Camallanus worms, need very specific help

[Cabie]

But what about the things I have that only really eat live or frozen stuff? Do I just mix the meds with it while I prep it?

For my very picky Green Terror, I made gel food by adding unflavored Knox gelatine to frozen bloodworms (or you can use any other frozen food they like). I let the bloodworms thaw in the fridge. Then I prepared a Knox gelatine mixture: add 1 pouch of gelatine (7g) to 1/4 cup of cold water and let sit for 1 minute, then add 1/4 cup of boiling water and stir during 2 minutes. Add a little bit of that mixture to the thawed bloodworms (the amount you need will vary depending on how much liquid the frozen food you use contain; in my case, I used a ratio bloodworms / gelatine mixture of about 3 to 1, but you might have to experience to find what works best.) After mixing the gelatine with the bloodworms, add the medication and mix well. Then put it in the fridge for 3 hours. After 3 hours, it should hold together well. If not, you will have to adjust the amount of gelatine in your recipe. Cut this gel food in small bits and feed to the fish. You can keep this gel food in the fridge for up to 3 days.

Do you have some fish that only accept live food? If so, what type of live food do you feed them?

And what about larvae in the substrate, do I just let them continuously infect the fish and treat until there's none left?

Ideally, you should vacuum your substrate. For sand, I use something like this with a bucket, so that the sand doesn't go in the sink: http://ca-en.hagen.com/Aquatic/Maintenance/Cleaning/11062

But my sand is not as small as play sand. I don't know how well it would work with play sand, but it would be worth a try.

 

[squint]

They can be resistant to any de-wormers, it depends a lot on what de-wormers a strain of worms has previously been exposed to. So worms are more likely to be resistant to the de-wormers that are the most commonly used. I've seen a lot of people report resistance to levamisole, fenbendazole and flubendazole, because these are the de-wormers that are used the most. I've seen fewer people report resistance to Nematol (emamectin benzoate), probably because it is not yet as commonly used as the others. But Nematol can be deadly for some species of fish, so it can't always be used.

Basically, the only way to know if the strain of worms you are dealing with is resistant to a certain medication is to try it.

This kind of resistance isn't seen in human or pets, only cattle.

It's easy enough to explain in cattle because they use antihelminthics on a massive scale.

Usage in fish doesn't even come close.

Dogs have been getting monthly heartworm treatments for decades and they're only now starting to worry about resistance.

Reports of treatment failure are almost certainly due to user error or the simple fact that treating worms is somewhat complex.

 

[Cabie]

Reports of treatment failure are almost certainly due to user error or the simple fact that treating worms is somewhat complex.

Knowing that worms CAN develop resistance, I think we can't rule out that possibility either. I've seen a lot of cases where people had used the right medication with the right dosage and it had no effect on the worms. Some of these people had even had their fish diagnosed by a vet and had used the medication as prescribed. Then they switched to a different de-wormer and it worked. In some cases, they managed to kill most of the worms with the first medication, but had to switch to a different de-wormer to kill the remaining few.

 

[Hybridfish7]

regardless, I have 30 doses worth of fenbendazole being shipped right now, should be here tomorrow
I'll just mix it with mysis shrimp since all my fish can and will eat mysis shrimp
that should be alot friendlier on the fish, instead of throwing cow medication at them and draining the tank in order to get paralyzed worms out of the water twice a week for 3 weeks
and since I did siphon out some adult worms from the first levamisole treatment in the tank with the medakas, I have faith that all that's left is larvae that should be killed off by the fenbendazole (and I shouldn't have to worry about there being living viable larvae in paralyzed or dead adults)
just to make things clear, fenbendazole should be dosed at 0.1 gram per every 20 gallons of water correct? and I know it's not very soluble so I will make sure to mix it very thoroughly
and this should be done daily for 3 days, for 3 weeks?

 

[Cabie]

regardless, I have 30 doses worth of fenbendazole being shipped right now, should be here tomorrow
I'll just mix it with mysis shrimp since all my fish can and will eat mysis shrimp
that should be alot friendlier on the fish, instead of throwing cow medication at them and draining the tank in order to get paralyzed worms out of the water twice a week for 3 weeks
and since I did siphon out some adult worms from the first levamisole treatment in the tank with the medakas, I have faith that all that's left is larvae that should be killed off by the fenbendazole (and I shouldn't have to worry about there being living viable larvae in paralyzed or dead adults)
just to make things clear, fenbendazole should be dosed at 0.1 gram per every 20 gallons of water correct? and I know it's not very soluble so I will make sure to mix it very thoroughly
and this should be done daily for 3 days, for 3 weeks?

If you put it in the food, then there's no need to put it in the water too. Fenbendazole is more effective and safer when used in the food anyway. Dosage is 2,5 mg / gram of food. Make sure you calculate the dosage based on the amount of Fenbendazole your powder contains (for example, one package of Fish Bendazole weighs 2000 mg, but actually contains only 250 mg of Fenbendazole.
Yes, you can feed the medicated food for 3 days, for 3 weeks.

 

[squint]

Knowing that worms CAN develop resistance, I think we can't rule out that possibility either. I've seen a lot of cases where people had used the right medication with the right dosage and it had no effect on the worms. Some of these people had even had their fish diagnosed by a vet and had used the medication as prescribed. Then they switched to a different de-wormer and it worked. In some cases, they managed to kill most of the worms with the first medication, but had to switch to a different de-wormer to kill the remaining few.

It's possible but just because something is possible doesn't mean it's likely.

Anthelminthics are used globally in massive quantities in livestock for decades vs. a handful of aquarists for around 5 years;.

Livestock eat and defecate in the same area while it's unclear how fish carrying resistant Camallanus would travel upstream of the distribution network and return to breeders especially considering that studies show that Camallanus can't reproduce for more than 2-3 generations in aquaria.

Hobbyists have an extremely low success rate treating fish so attributing treatment failure to resistance is unreasonable.

There are accounts online of people using praziquantel and metronidazole and then concluding Camallanus had developed resistance. It's also common to use fenbendazole in the water despite it being insoluble.

And when a vast majority of hobbyists decide that something is a fact, they are more often that not incorrect.

I would like to see an aquatic veterinarian's report that Camallanus was resistant to treatment.

I could find no record of Camallanus cotti anthelminthic resistance in the scientific literature nor any mention that it was likely. Indeed, the only mention is that since it's a nematode in the digestive tract, any nematicide should work.

Broadening my search to the entire Camallanus genus still didn't yield any results.

 

[Hybridfish7]

day 25 of the outbreak
how fast is this supposed to work
3 days into fenbendazole treatment, fish are starting to show signs that the worms are in their intestines
i might switch back to levamisole but i've also heard a little bit about treatment with formalin?

 

[Hybridfish7]

Day 34
Worms seem to be gone but that's creating bacterial infections for the fish
Last round of treatment will be done this weekend
Guppy tank is suffering from bacterial infections, my rams died to bacterial infections, male convict died to a bacterial infection, all the remaining medakas died to bacterial infections
How long does the worm live without a host? Trying to figure out if the siphon is safe to use without reinfecting the tanks. Last time I used it was 4 weeks ago
I heard the worms die after 3 days when dried out and can only live 3 weeks without a host. Is this true?

 

[Shelilla]

It's possible but just because something is possible doesn't mean it's likely.

Anthelminthics are used globally in massive quantities in livestock for decades vs. a handful of aquarists for around 5 years;.

Livestock eat and defecate in the same area while it's unclear how fish carrying resistant Camallanus would travel upstream of the distribution network and return to breeders especially considering that studies show that Camallanus can't reproduce for more than 2-3 generations in aquaria.

Hobbyists have an extremely low success rate treating fish so attributing treatment failure to resistance is unreasonable.

There are accounts online of people using praziquantel and metronidazole and then concluding Camallanus had developed resistance. It's also common to use fenbendazole in the water despite it being insoluble.

And when a vast majority of hobbyists decide that something is a fact, they are more often that not incorrect.

I would like to see an aquatic veterinarian's report that Camallanus was resistant to treatment.

I could find no record of Camallanus cotti anthelminthic resistance in the scientific literature nor any mention that it was likely. Indeed, the only mention is that since it's a nematode in the digestive tract, any nematicide should work.

Broadening my search to the entire Camallanus genus still didn't yield any results.

I can damn well tell you from direct experience. I am going through this nightmare right now. These insidious parasitic scum are still happily going in and out of the anuses of my fish after dosing 3-4 times now with on large amounts of levamisole in both the water and their food (latest was adding 1g of LM to my 20g for 3 days, carbon removed and lights off, no dice), and this is after copius amounts of fenbendazole did nothing to kill the adult worms in the first fish that had it. Three days after adding the so-called "killing dose" of very pure (99%+) Levamisole HCl to the water and basically soaking their food in a paste of it they still have alive adult worms. Did it kill some worms? I think so, some went pale and popped out the anus all shriveled up but I didn't directly see any of them expelled. Nor did it kill most of them, of all the fish I noticed adult worms coming out of none so far has been cured. They are ****ing awful. Fenbendazole comes in liquid form for dog dewormers, I got mine liquid from the vet. Hell, my fish ate that medication raw because they saw white droplets in the water and tried to eat it.

I'm hoping to god that when I get nematol in from a german ebay seller my fish will still be alive enough to survive the treatment. And if that somehow doesn't cure them, then I think I'm going to just stop keeping fish altogether.

Just because you can't find results in an understudied topic doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The proof is in the pudding, and if it were just something hobbyists "decided", then I think all these drastic measures myself and others who care about and love their fish to the point of trying enough treatments it may kill the fish from stress (its that or death by parasites when it comes to these camallanus bastards), we would have success. But we haven't. They're still very much alive. And I wish it could be any other way.

 

[Hybridfish7]

Hope your treatment goes well. Mine went by already, I lost about a quarter of my fishroom (only had about 90 fish at the time, lost 20 something) but the populations that could, recovered. Thing that got hit the hardest was my guppy colony, my rams and a male convict died of secondary infections, and I lost a redeye tetra that couldn't handle the treatment. I also lost the ricefish that brought it into the fishroom in the first place of course. I did a single week's worth of levamisole treatment and 3 weeks of fenbendazole.