The Puffer Forum

Here's a link to my IP Tale 'o Woe: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=24479

Tonite, I took some pics of Neville that I wanted to post because I wanted y'all's opinion if his appearance was in the normal range for DP's. But dang it if he didn't have a string hanging out of his bung. Here's some pics for those that love photo-ops of DPs with stringy poo:


This pic was taken just before I fed him some bloodworms (it had been about 11 hours since his last feeding).



This pic was taken just after I fed him... note the cobweb trailing behind him. These pics were taken tonite within 20 minutes of each other.

My last tank treatment was with Levamisole HCI and I must have used it incorrectly. I used these instructions from C. Harrison: http://www.inkmkr.com/Fish/CamallanusTr ... edure.html

I note that this is vastly different from the Levamisole article stickied on this forum. Harrison's article seems to be geared specifically for callamanus worms. I'm fretting because the stickied article by Pufferpunk says that Levamisole is useless at ph over 6. Mine is at 7.6 and refuses to drop any (I tried on another FW tank many months ago... the ph just won't budge).

My question is this: I've got alot of Levamisole left... can I use it and how should I do it? I'd love for RTR and C. Harrison to weigh in here.

As always, I appreciate the advice that is so freely given.

You must have a lot of buffering in your water. What have you tried so far to lower the pH? It shouldn't be that hard, IMO.

If that article is true (not saying it's not, only that's the first I've heard that about pH and levamisole) then if you cannot get the pH of that tank lower, you will have to set up quarantine with RO water and set the ph at 6 ish and treat the fish there. Remember you'll have to drip acclimate the fish or even start with pH a bit higher than you want and lower it very slowly over a period of days until it's in target range.

<<runs off to read PPs article>>

Not to step on any toes but I found this about levamisole and pH, and it's good news, actually:

De-bunking a common misunderstanding about Levamisole HCl.

Does Levamisole HCl require a pH of below 7.0 to be effective?

In a word, NO.

This common misconception regarding the uselessness of Levamisole HCl in higher pH water needed a definitive answer.

Let's apply some common sense. When we look around at the other uses of Levamisole HCl we find that one common formulation is administered by adding it to livestock drinking water. Are all water supplies the same? It seemed unlikely to me that among all the farms using this medication every water supply would have a pH below 7.0.

After some digging around all over the Internet and phone calls to various Veterinarians and chemical companies the answer I was given by Dr. Hal Sinclair of IVX Animal Health was both clear and simple. Levamisole base (C11H12N2S) is unstable in water and will degrade rapidly as pH levels increase. Levamisole HCl will not. It's the addition of the hydrochloride molecule that makes the difference.

Levamisole HCl is stable in water for up to 90 days and will do its job in aquaria with with both low and high pH values.

Taking the space to go through all this chemistry may be more than you want to know. However, chemistry plays a large role in fishkeeping. It helps to be somewhat comfortable with the basics to comprehend the Nitrogen cycle and to balance the aquatic environments in which our fish live. Planted tank gurus, especially, spend time understanding the chemistry of their tanks for both fish and plant benefit.

Chemistry has already helped us to answer the pH question which has been plaguing the community for years. We will need it again in order to determine effective dosing of Levamisole HCl to cure our fish. Knowing the chemical formula, the molecular weight, and the specific gravity of the molecule will give us the information we need to make some calculations that will help us to do just that.

Source: http://www.loaches.com/Members/shari2/l ... chloride-1

Reefchik,
Thank you for that!

So would you suggest following pufferpunk's article using the HCI variant?

Yes I would, no time to waste. Your little guy looks fairly emaciated.
I bought mine from Charles Harrison at inkmkr.com and he does respond promptly to emails.

Try soaking brine shrimp in the meds. I think it absorbs the meds better than bloodworms.

I crush up a piece of a ip tablet and sprinkle some in a very small(1 tbls) amount of water containing about ten brine shrimp. I let it sit for about 10 minutes and then feed it with a pair of tweezers. Before I pick the shrimp out of the water I give it a few squeezes with the treezers to help it absorb the medication. I try to get it in their little mouths as quickly as possible so it doesn't wash out in the tank water. I've treated my 2 DPs with success this way though they weren't as skinny as your little guy. They had IP poop so I know for sure they were infected.

I had one that died and he was as skinny as yours when it first started. I couldn't get that fish to eat so I wound up using 2-3 times the dosage for treating just the water and added extra aeration. The overdose didn't seem to harm the fish but I had to put him down some time later...It just could not and would not eat.

At least your guy is eating.

You don't soak food in levamisole; it is (I think) mainly absorbed through the gut, skin and gills, but I can't quote the source this moment. I read that somewhere last night. You just treat the entire tank.

~reefchik~ wrote:Yes I would, no time to waste. Your little guy looks fairly emaciated.
I bought mine from Charles Harrison at inkmkr.com and he does respond promptly to emails.

I've got some of his levamisole on hand and I just finished dosing the tank. I'm going to use pufferpunk's schedule but do it three times (I.e. dose tank, wait 24hrs, large pwc, wait 72 hrs, repeat... until I've dosed the tank 3 times).

So does Neville look that bad? He still eats very well and actively swims about the tank, so I'm hopeful that irreparable damage has not been done.

DPs only very rarely can have their IPs narrowed down to nematode parasites IME - they are so small they make a poor host to most actual worms, either the parasites bypass them, or more likely DPs die of them too quickly to make it into our hands with the worms large enough to be visible (even if our treatments work and the worms are killed and expelled.)
Examine this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4083589

The makers of wormer plus designed the product for intestinal flukes and tapeworms, however, it does MUCH more than that. It's effective against some anaerobic bacterias, very effective on internal anaerobic protozoans, deadly to basically all flatworms and roundworms, kills hydra and many other soft bodied inverts (including some types of snails and even certain strains of shrimp, seemingly almost at random) and as you can see in the pubmed article above, kills nematodes and other round worms just as dead as flatworms. I've saved Oscars with severe hole in the head with just a high dose flubendazole regimen. Also, it has no effect on 'pods for some reason. Will wipe out every rotifer in the tank, without really impacting your 'pods at all.

Really, it does everything praziquantel, metronidzaole, or levimisole do, and in my experience & opinion, does it more effectively and more safely than any of them and in particular, more safely than the cocktail of meds you need to treat unspecified IPs, which is pretty much all you see in DPs.
Fahakas, I've seen pictures of clearly pooing tapeworm, so the owner knows prazi will work fine for that, but a DP is going to die long before it had tapeworms in it's poo, the red moving threads of camellanus worms sticking out it's rear, and is too small to readily tell ivory-cream "dripping wax" poos of internal protozoans from any other parasite poo.

tl;dr - get some wormer plus or 20% or so flubendazole from C. Harrison if you like (he's a good guy, I've dealt with him, I had nearly forgotten, he's the only guy this side of the pond making flubendazole medication at high enough a strength for broad spectrum use). Safer and more likely to work when you can't be sure the type of IPs.

Nick wrote:... get some wormer plus or 20% or so flubendazole from C. Harrison if you like (he's a good guy, I've dealt with him, I had nearly forgotten, he's the only guy this side of the pond making flubendazole medication at high enough a strength for broad spectrum use). Safer and more likely to work when you can't be sure the type of IPs.

In my original thread (link in the op), it was C. Harrison that made the nematode diagnosis and suggested levamisole hcl. I'm going to let this treatment run its course... if it fails, I'll order some flubendazole from him.

The latest poo observations seem a bit odd. I'm seeing poo that alternates between stringy white and thick, dark brown. I've even seen one poop that was thick, dark brown on the ends and long, white and stringy in the middle. Neville has produced at least one poop that looked like a clear bloodworm casing ( and I think I have seen others like that on the substrate).

I'm hopeful that the ip's are passing and that the dark poops are normal (and indicative of him getting some level of normal digestion/nutrition into his system).