What does AEFW damage look like?

[Myka]

Sorry to hear about your AEFW infection. That's the worst.

You can usually battle them by only dipping the Acros. You will find that AEFW have "favourite" coral and if you monitor those ones you should be able to tell if you're winning or losing.

[asylumdown]

I'm going to invest in a few more bottles of flatworm exit to make super concentrated dips. How many times a week do I need to dip my corals to make sure that any eggs that I miss hatch, but are killed before they get old enough to lay their own eggs?

[aqua80]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I'm going to invest in a few more bottles of flatworm exit to make super concentrated dips. How many times a week do I need to dip my corals to make sure that any eggs that I miss hatch, but are killed before they get old enough to lay their own eggs?

flatworm exit don't work with aefw...
Rps all-out works well with the adults (as revive and coralrx) and maybe eggs, but that's not proven for now and if you dip many colonies you have to put them in QT tank...
Do as Rice Reef said to eradicate them... dipping 1x a week for 8 weeks is what I would do... keeping all acros out of the main tank...

Or have a couple of wrasse and blast your corals every once in while to live with them (what I am doing)

[asylumdown]

Flatworm exit certainly worked on my AEFW, but I was using a concentration of over 30 times the recommended dose. At that dose it also killed all the pods, bristle worms, and acropora crabs on my corals as well. In fact, the acropora crab's legs started falling off before they died, so I'm wondering if it somehow affects their connective tissue? The worms that were on the visibly damaged piece started curling up and dying the instant they went in the water with the flatworm exit. They fell off after about a minute, but again, we're talking concentrations several orders of magnitude higher than the bottle recommends. I would never put that high a dose in my display, as it would likely wipe it out.

I'm following the thread on Reef Central about RPS all out. I'm going to buy some, and hopefully the guy who's posting close up pictures of the eggs will report that they've all been killed by this treatment. QTing all 43 colonies of my acroporids for 8 weeks in a way that guarantees none of them die to to system instability or poor water quality will require nothing short of a second, fully established reef system with all the lights, flow and dosing equipment I have on my big tank. That's not a cost I'm capable of outlaying ATM, and after my experience with losing every single fish because of a QT system failure, I have little interest in courses of treatment that end up being worse than the disease. Whatever chemicals I use, the protocol will have to be dipping, then returning to the display.

[kien]

Originally Posted by aqua80

Or have a couple of wrasse and blast your corals every once in while to live with them (what I am doing)

With all the AEFW talk recently I did my fair share of googling and did find quite a few nice sps reefs that employ this methodology. They simply accept the fact that the worms are there and keep their population down so that they do not reach plague proportions and over run the colony. This appears to have worked for quite a few people. I myself would probably lean towards this. Once you have them you will probably have them FOREVER unless you throw away your entire stock or treat your entire stock all at once for weeks.

[asylumdown]

This quote from a thread on WAMAS' forum (http://wamas.org/forums/topic/33942-...m-aefw-thread/) is exactly why I don't want to QT all my acroporids:

"Through all of this - I lost no corals to AEFW. I lost corals to being moved around from tank to tank, and from over-long dipping, too-harsh dips, etc. But the AEFW damage corals pretty slowly. They are pretty fragile creatures, and rarely survive more than 24 hours in a cup of water at room temperature. They have a tendency to just 'dissolve' (autolyse) when they get stressed."

My knee jerk reaction to ich in my tank led to me killing every fish I had when the QT tank they were in over-heated. I'm sure some/most of those fish would still be alive if I had left them in the display and learned to manage ich. I wanted to 'eradicate' ich from my system - and I did, by eradicating all my fish. I'm going to try my best to manage this in a way that doesn't put the lives of my otherwise extremely healthy corals at risk. From what I can see after extensive searching, next to nothing is known about the life-cycle of this parasite, and the guy who wrote that long post found that even after leaving some acroporids in his tank while he experimented on the infected ones, his system was cleared of infection by treating the infected corals. That gives me some hope. I also found it interesting that he found crushed garlic pills would kill the flatworms at high concentrations. That might be something to invest in.

[Aquattro]

FWIW, I had AEFW years ago, long before anyone knew what they were. I saw a couple now and then under the scope, and just thought they looked cool and put them back in the tank. The tank thrived for years. I had a 6-line wrasse, not sure if that helped.
But the task of moving a full SPS into QT ,weekly dipping, etc, would probably be way worse than dealing with them in tank. Worst case, one coral gets hit bad, so toss it out. Unless these things were absolutely killing all my corals, I wouldn't do anything other than baste and buy wrasses.

[lastlight]

I believe Sanjay Joshi lives with them. Just looking at his tank is proof that you can do this no prob.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Aquattro

FWIW, I had AEFW years ago, long before anyone knew what they were. I saw a couple now and then under the scope, and just thought they looked cool and put them back in the tank. The tank thrived for years. I had a 6-line wrasse, not sure if that helped.
But the task of moving a full SPS into QT ,weekly dipping, etc, would probably be way worse than dealing with them in tank. Worst case, one coral gets hit bad, so toss it out. Unless these things were absolutely killing all my corals, I wouldn't do anything other than baste and buy wrasses.

Originally Posted by lastlight

I believe Sanjay Joshi lives with them. Just looking at his tank is proof that you can do this no prob.

I just looked at my bottle of CoralRX. It expired in November 2011 - perhaps that explains how I got them

Here's my plan of attack: I just ordered a couple bottles of Revive and RPS All Out from Reef Supplies. When they get here, I'm going to dip all my acropora corals that I can easily get off the rocks in the All Out. If I see no signs of any more worms falling off, I'm going to call it a day and only think about it again if I see new damage to a coral. No crazy interventions, and I don't want to mess with something that doesn't seem that broken.

[lastlight]

yeah i like that approach although it sounds like all acros should be done in this manner to make it worth it right?