Welcome to GuppyLog.com
New to Guppylog?
Immediate Help


Conversions and Calculator
Conversions and Tank volume calculator


Add yourself to our guppylog map
Guppylog Members


* Change as much water as often as you can! *
Inkmaker
Front Page · Everything · News · Ask Guppylog · Diaries
AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus!

All Topics
By PeterW
from the oh no not again department, Section Diaries
Posted on Wed Aug 29, 2007 at 01:50:16 PM PST
Tags: (all tags)
I lost two of my blue moscow trio (1 female yesterday, the male today).  I'd assumed it was bacterial, but when I looked more closely at the male, AARGH!!!!  There they were!



I found unclescott's comments on Peter Burgess's article about it from January last year.  The "highly animated larvae" that were mentioned really struck home.  I've been looking closely in the water and I see wriggling worms swirling around everywhere and small tiny white dots swimming around like crazy.  I could easily imagine these dots were the larvae.

I've already hit them with levamisole.  I've noticed that the wriggling worms in the water have reduced their wriggling already.

And wouldn't you know it? I've had this trio of fish for 3-4 months.  And had zero fry from them.  The article mentions 3-4 months for the adults to grow, and how females avoid infected males.

Now, here's the question.  Levamisole doesn't kill the worms, it just paralyzes them for a while (found this on a human medical info site).  After the levamisole is gone, they recover.  Hence the instructions about a vigorous gravel vac to remove the worms from the gravel.  Would it make sense to move the fish to another bare-bottom tank for a week?  Does anybody know how long they can live without a host?  Or live while paralyzed?

Unclescott: did the article talk much about how to eradicate them?  You mentioned something about a 1-week bath and a 2-day strong bath, I think.  The tank is swarming with swimming larvae right now.

And what is really disturbing me right now is that I recognize the swimming larvae.  I've seen them in a tank I was using for quarantine before...  I'm pretty sure that it was before I treated every single tank last time.  Obviously the treatment didn't work, I didn't know the levamisole just paralyzed them and I dont think I vacuumed the gravel in this tank enough.

I think I have enough levamisole to treat every single tank again.  I think I have to assume that they are all infected.  Aargh.

< Two more questions... | Megaguppie RIP >
Menu

· create account

· F.A.Q. For Newbies!

· Immediate Help For Newbies!

· search


Web www.guppylog.com

· Scoop Info

· Our Tanks

Login
Make a new account
Username:
Password:

Related Links
· Scott
· PeterW's Diary

Display: Sort:
AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#12)
by PeterW on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 04:36:11 PM PST

Wow.  Patient Zero just did the mother-of-all-poops.  Two inches long, roughly 1.5mm in diameter (I'm guessing that is about 1/16 of an inch) made up of all sorts of "things".  Pretty gross actually.

What is really freaky is that a "pod" or cyst type thing was included in the strand including all sorts of things inside.  I could almost imagine that being a nest or cluster of worms or something.  And the last part out was the normal colour.

Oh boy, if she had all that clogged up inside...  Poor fishy!

The bad news is that I've found the worms in at least one more tank, and I dont know for sure which it was.  They were in the bottom of a bucket that I used to siphon water out of three tanks with.  I have an idea which one it came from, but I was planning to treat all of those anyway - I was reducing the water levels to reduce the amount of levamisole I needed.

Interestingly,  by looking at the fish behavior, I can see that some of them are acting "strange" for guppies - ie: rather quiet.  While other tanks are running at 100% maximum capacity mating activity - definately not "quiet". So far all the worms have come from (I think) the quiet ones.

I dont think all the tanks are infected.  At least not to the same level as the worst ones.



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#14)
by miskairal on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 07:52:08 PM PST

"Better out than in" as the saying goes. I wonder if that means she is no longer infected?
--
Repeat after me,
I will read the Immediate Help
[ Parent ]


Were you able to siphon that out ASAP? (none / 1) (#13)
by unclescott on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 07:22:01 PM PST

Would you have been able to put it under a microscope? Do you have a video connection you could make to that microscope? (I would be yes, maybe, no so would not wish to be judgemental.) Camallanus are livebearers, but evidentally eggs cases for other worms and wee beasties can be identified from faeces. Or so I've read. ;)

So long as you are finding stuff in the bucket and it is an out bucket, nothing is worse. I imagine you do this Peter, but for the casual reading it may seem like an unreasonable expense. At certain times you don't want to use an "in bucket" as an outbucket Compare a couple of dollar bucket with losses from any of a number of common diseases.

That out bucket can also be the one used for cleaning paint brushes, using a soap or ammonia solution on the floor. You are still just buying one bucket for the fish in most cases.

In time one may buy a couple of buckets. Dark black buckets are my out buckets for anything suspect. (I got a price I couldn't pass up, on a couple of industrial grade ones.) The inexpensive light colored or white ones from bakeries or the hardware store sales insure that, however peroccupied one is, clean new water isn't administered in a suspect bucket.

Even with the "nasty" bucket, there is always a freezing night like this evening. And in the summer, they may get the bleach solution from a cleaned out tank, before it is dumped down a toilet or laundry room sink.

Getting back to your observation about healthy looking vs unhealthy looking fishes,I think you are on to something. You've read Houde's book since I have. Is that where it suggested that female guppies will refuse diseased males? They seem to be able to tell.

That might be a que to deworm a tank.

All the best!
u.s.

[ Parent ]



Re: Were you able to siphon that out ASAP? (none / 0) (#17)
by PeterW on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 09:16:04 AM PST

oops, I forgot to answer the question.  I have a photo, but no microscope.  What is especially disturbing is that she's let one of these cyst type things out before, about a week or so ago.

[ Parent ]


Re: Were you able to siphon that out ASAP? (none / 1) (#16)
by PeterW on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 09:13:51 AM PST

I have a stack of buckets in two colours from home depot.  White = clean (in) water, Red/orange = dirty (out) or unknown.  I have about 15 "out" buckets that I leave to dry outside after use.  

The only possible transgression is when I catch fry that get siphoned into the 'out' buckets and put them back in the tank.  But by then, the bucket is 99.9999% of the current tank's water and I'd have to be moderately unlucky to transfer something that way.  But it is possible.

BTW: I was right about which of the three tanks had the worms - it was the ones with the fish behaving strangely.  So far there have been no worms on the tank bottoms in the other nearby tanks that I've treated, but plenty in the contaminated ones.  I'm quite amazed that there is such a difference, I'd expected camallanus would spread like lightning, but it seems that I've had some that have had worms for months (reaching maturity) and have other tanks that still appear clean.

I've noticed that even a fairly strong bleach mixture takes a disturbingly long time to kill the wretched things..  A 30%-ish solution of chlorine bleach still had wrigglers after 10-15 minutes.  I have oxygen bleach (peroxide I think) too, but I didn't want to risk mixing the two together - I dont recall my chemistry that well.  Having two buckets with strong chemicals next to each other is inviting trouble.  I dont want to mistakenly mix them and discover a way to generate chlorine gas or the like.

[ Parent ]



It takes about three months for the worms to reach (none / 0) (#18)
by unclescott on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 12:09:25 PM PST

maturity. So if your fish became infected at the wholesalers (sometimes with their central flow through systems) and you picked up the fish at a shop a couple of weeks later, 2.5 to three months before you discover the damage is not unusual. I think you suggested that large guppies not delivering fry, in addition to your more recent behavioral observations, are important warning signs.

However by the time the adult Ca,ellanus are releasing young, the guppies or whatever is hosting them, could be in pretty bad shape. That is the problem with hidden biological time bombs we may not even know exist.

I've a couple of 2.5 gallon tanks which don't get used as much any more, except as holding tanks for new purchases. So long as they are there anyway, adding a dewormer and then maybe the next week changing out the water 100% and adding a parasite guard for internal stuff is not a bad idea.

My purchases these days are mostly from club auctions. They are not as inclined towards illnesses as stuff which has gone through commercial channels and been exposed to more fish and more stress. Velvet spores and bacteria could still come in through the water supply or be airborn, so it still makes sense to keep the tank as clean as possible.

My one case of Ich in decades came in with some Endler's via a club transaction (Christmas party actually - Ho Ho Ho) and must have been quiescent for 3-4 years before having the opportunity to break out of their cysts to make themselves known.  Got greedy at the ALA convention and placed several fish together in a ten gallon tank and Hexamida took some of them. The two tanks of Goodieds which were set up by themselves were fine.

When, oh when, will "my eyes not be bigger than my stomach?"

All the best!
unc;e

[ Parent ]



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#2)
by PeterW on Mon Feb 07, 2005 at 09:40:11 PM PST

BTW: I got some short video clips of both the worms and the larvae in action.  Would anybody be interested in seeing them?

Sadly, the best encoder I've found is windows media..  It is currently doing quite well with 1/10 of the file size of the other encoders (DV, mpeg1 and 2, quicktime).  I haven't tried any of the other more fancy ones (XVid etc) though.



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#4)
by miskairal on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 01:35:54 AM PST

I'd be interested but am on the slow version of dialup. You'd be surprised how slow my dial up can get, but then maybe not - you've heard of Telstra ;)

What sort of size are we looking at?
--
Repeat after me,
I will read the Immediate Help
[ Parent ]



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#6)
by PeterW on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 11:24:12 AM PST

Heh, my modem connect rate (on a pairgain system) was in the order of 16kbps.

Anyway,
http://canning.wemm.org/~peter/camallanus/

There are several files:
[VID] camallanus-larvae.wmv    08-Feb-2005 11:09   1.5M  
[VID] camallanus-larvae250.wmv 08-Feb-2005 11:09   446k  
[VID] camallanus-worms.wmv     08-Feb-2005 11:12   4.7M  
[VID] camallanus-worms250.wmv  08-Feb-2005 11:13   1.3M  

The *250 are 250K/sec, the larger ones are 1000K/sec.  The first pair are the larvae hopping around at the surface, the second pair are worms themselves, suspended in the tank water, with a few larvae zipping by.

These should all be within reach of a modem.

Quicktime gave worse quality with 10MB and 44MB files.

Be sure you dont need to eat for a while.  I lost my appetite thinking of these things inside the fish.

[ Parent ]



Are those round things some sort of (none / 1) (#15)
by unclescott on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 08:26:50 PM PST

crustacean, possibly of the group called cladocerans?

http://www.mpil-ploen.mpg.de/english/evoleco/staff/skupch.htm

shows images of a different species of Camallanus and their larvae. Notice that the larvae are still very worm like. Indeed stage one larvae are mostly tail so they can thrash around invitingly and get swallowed. They develop a functional gut later. Their first job is to get into a digestive tract.

Did find a study corroborating with your suggestion that at least sometimes behavioral stuff show that the fish may be infected.
http://www.athiel.com/lib10/drj4.htm

Passing in the feces is one of the ways to spread the larvae.
http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~parasite/camallanus.html

I sent the URL for your videos to a biologist friend who understands stuff in photos which never register with me.

TTTL and ATB!
u.s.

[ Parent ]



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#9)
by miskairal on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 08:16:50 PM PST

I've seen worse :)

I chose the two smaller files, the 1.3MB file took 15 minutes (which is why I didn't try the 4MB one)and the 446k file took only 5 minutes.

Holy toledo batman, that's an awful lot of camallanus (which I've never seen before). Wow! I can't get over it and am still trying to pick up my lower jaw from the keyboard. I assumed they would be red b/c that is how it is described when coming out of the fish's rear end.

Can I link to these in the QuickLinks Peter? Will you be leaving the files there?

Thankyou for sharing that (I think)
Cheerio
miskairal
--
Repeat after me,
I will read the Immediate Help
[ Parent ]



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#10)
by PeterW on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 11:33:34 PM PST

When up close and personal, they were reddish.  But most of that detail was lost with the video compression.

The little things darting around fast were very white though.  The worms seemed to fade to grey after a while.

Yes, you can add them to quicklinks providing I can move them at some point, and the URL's in the posting can be updated.  The location they're in was a "hmm, where can I put them quickly?" thing.

Its important to note that all the worms you see are those that abandoned ship after the two fish died.  There were a heck of a lot more inside the fish still.

To give you an idea of the scale of the second recording, you can see the reflection of the 1.5-inch camera lens on the glass.  The camcorder was only an inch or two away from the glass.  The field of view in the image is about 2-3 inches wide.  You're seeing about 5% of the tank on screen at any given time.  On the other hand, the first recording is showing about 1/2 of the tank surface.

Meanwhile, my poor fish has still got them coming out.  Poor poor fish.  At least she's shrinking, her rear-end shape has changed considerably.  The levamisole is still active it seems.

[ Parent ]



Re: AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! (none / 0) (#11)
by miskairal on Wed Feb 09, 2005 at 01:08:02 AM PST

When I said I've seen worse, I meant modem speeds, btw and certainly not the camallanus ;)

Have added it to the QuickLinks.
--
Repeat after me,
I will read the Immediate Help
[ Parent ]



I think the one week bath would be with the (none / 1) (#1)
by unclescott on Sun Feb 06, 2005 at 04:00:14 PM PST

anthelmintic. I was of the impression from Charles' articles that Levamisole should kill the worms. I don't have the data to argue with the medical site on humans (though Levamisole may be among the anthelmintics used to treat people in the Phillipines). Did that article explore what different doses? Did they look at different temperatures? (Would the anthelmintic become denatured at 98.6 F, but not at 78 degrees F?) Would the medium the medicine was presented in (a human body massing a lot more than a guppy) make a difference? How long did they test the worms in the human subject? Presumably researchers are not this impatient, but people are famous for not taking their medicine after they began to feel slightly better. They then get sick again and in the meantime, they may have helped a generation of the disease organism grow up which showed some immunity to the limited dosage of the med.

If the worms are paralyzing after a couple of hours, what will they be like at the end of a week? That's a long time to not eat or maybe not properly absorb oxygen or metabolize what food was in its system.

See
http://inkmkr.com/Fish/CamellanusTreatment.pdf
http://www.guppylog.com/story/2004/4/20/81759/6793

More recently Flubendazole was becoming more popular as a Camallanusicide (?) because it seemed to dissolve a little better in the water and was a tad less expensive. Unfortunately it seems to have disappeared from the market. It turns out that its manufacturer went out of business. I don't know why.

Give the Levamisole a chance to work. I do hear (as per one of your posts) that different anthelmintics may be more effective against different species of worms. Before bailing out on it give it the time period Charles recommended. Of course you removed any activated carbon. Also look to see if there is mulm or other miscellaneous organic deposits which might absorb some of the medication.

My knowledge of Camallanus is academic, in response to questions in GL. Still, especially since it is in the tank, give it a week.

All the best!
u.s.



Re: I think the one week bath would be with the (none / 0) (#3)
by PeterW on Mon Feb 07, 2005 at 09:45:33 PM PST

I thought I posted a bunch of references showing that levamisole doesn't actually kill them, but I dont see it (must have forgotten to submit it at home).

There are lots and lots of medical references for using levamisole specifically to paralyze nematodes for lab study etc.

Specifically, it interrupts a certain type of nerve receptor or pathway in their bodies which prevents them from moving.  

Maybe it is a dose thing, maybe they die after not being able to nourish themselves, I don't know.  Anyway, I'm not taking the chance.  I took the gravel out and it, plants, etc are soaking in serious bleach right now.  The filter is circulating though.

The horror of what I saw wriggling around in the tank gave me nightmares last night...

[ Parent ]



Dreams! It's no fun sometimes when our (none / 0) (#5)
by unclescott on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 09:29:04 AM PST

subconscious tap-dances on our experiences. Have never dreamed of being a guppy in a tank of carnivores (though there was the dream of hanging out around T. rex).

A dream of being a guppy with all those worm larvae wouldn't be fun. And it's so hard to surpress that feeding impulse. ;)

While just a lad, when on a camping trip along the western shore of Lake Superior, vigorously swam (because that's what you do in the near frigid waters of Lake Superior) out to a diving float, early one summer morning with my bro. In the six AM sunlight we watched a lot of foot-long sea lampreys swim in and bury themselves in the sand. That was harder to take than even the local 6" leaches.

I think we both recalled the images in books of their mouths of teeth and the awful wounds on salmon and lake trout. As close as one can come to running along the water's surface, we boogied for shore. In the wee hours, they appeared in cameos after that.

All the best!
unc;e

[ Parent ]



Re: Dreams! It's no fun sometimes when our (none / 0) (#7)
by PeterW on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 12:18:37 PM PST

OK, now I know you've lost the plot.. :)

[ Parent ]


OK, now I know you've lost the plot.. :) (none / 0) (#8)
by unclescott on Tue Feb 08, 2005 at 07:34:11 PM PST

So long as they don't plunk me in one right away. ;)

Gravely yours,
u.s.

[ Parent ]



AARGH!!! !@#^%!@$# Camallanus! | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Display: Sort:

SourceForge Logo Powered by Scoop
Subscribe to our news feed
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 2002 and beyond The Management

create account | faq | search