quarantine and treat for Camallanus. I don't know why, but livebearers are quite vulnerable to internal worms and external worms such as gill flukes. Maybe it is the nature of farming them which puts them into close proximity with these wee beasties.
When I brought back several fish native to Missouri under permit last fall, I treated for the usual set of stuff I have encountered or heard about and still had all sorts of difficulty with anchor worms, which were new to me. The anthelmintic used by me wasn't effective against them. Furthermore one treatment with Praziquantel, which is effective against those parasites, evidently didn't get the eggs. Early stages of that parasite infest gills and we don't see them there. There were more losses a month or two later until a few prolonged treatment seems to have gotten those in gills and more developed individuals which had grown to the (much more visible) skin parasite.
I'm glad that your tetras and others don't seem as prone to diseases. It seems that you have been here somewhere around three years and are still trying.
I have strains of livebearers that have plugged along for a decade. There was one new batch of fancy guppies which lived for some months and yet, despite a pretty fair preventative treatment process in quarantine, died without issue. They may just have been too old when I was given them, but it makes one wonder if internal parasites had previously sterilized them. Until the last couple of years I have never had guppies which didn't drop, if they were here for a month.
I have had better luck with wild killies than wild livebearers, but even there many hobbyists will agree that hobbyist raised killies are hardier than the wild stuff (which one needs to spawn and save eggs ASAP).
I wonder if the many tetra types which are spawned by commercial sources are more often raised indoors. That would somewhat separate them from birds, plants and snails which can be vectors (carriers) for parasites.
The aquarium hobby offers us access to more fishes than ever before. On the other hand, faster transportation and international movement of fishes from different areas has also allowa fish diseases to get carried more widely (in captive and even in wild fishes) than ever before.
This can be an issue for people as well. A few years ago, there was a blood drive where I taught and I found time to pull out my donor card and amble down to the room where the drive was held. The medical tech I was assigned to was quite widely traveled. Only two weeks before, he had been assisting in blood drives in Calcutta, India!
In colonial Virginia, about 1620 (about my freshman year), malaria in migrants and malaria spreading mosquitoes (in the ships' ballast water?) began to be spread from Europeans and Africans to Native Americans. (Those diseases and the lifestyle were tough enough on the immigrants, who had an 80% mortality rate over 20 years.) Old world diseases were even more devastating on the original residents. Today we step off of airplanes and bounce things like West Nile virus and St. Louis encephalitis all over the place.
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