Brown Jelly Disease: Under The Microscope!

[andrewey]

Hi everyone,

As there is very limited data concerning successful treatment options for brown jelly disease (BJD), I thought this would be a great opportunity to test some of the treatment options that have been anecdotally suggested. My wife and I have been busy all afternoon preparing slides and recording the progression of the disease at the macro and microscopic level from samples we harvested from one of our duncan frags (removed from the display). We're currently testing several treatment options in vitro, but I wanted to ask the community and see if anyone wanted us to test any specific compounds while we still have viable samples.

So far we plan to test different concentrations of:
metronidazole
lugol's solution
hydrogen peroxide
Bayer advanced complete insect killer
povidone iodine
RODI
bleach

Does anyone else have any other treatments options they would like tested? In addition if anyone has any specific experimental procedures they would like us to perform (such as concentration, time course, etc.) or other variables--let us know!

For a small sneak peak of our enemy, here's a quick TEASER


I've tagged twillard and Jason2459, but feel free to tag anyone else you think might want to add their input.
@twilliard @jason2459

 

[blennyfromtheblock]

Hyposalinity?

 

[vertigo01]

What about Fluconazole? It is working wonders on eradicating Bryopsis.

 

[ndrwater]

FIRE!!!!!!!

 

[Marlon2024]

FIRE!!!!!!!

Go Ducks!

 

[andrewey]

Will test Fluconazole and hyposalinity.

 

[DeepBrew]

FIRE!!!!!!!

Please do fire, I want to read through a 100 page thread with pictures of people waving frags in front of a propane torch.

 

[GoFish]

Wow! Thank you very much in advance for the time and effort you're about to put into this!
One more thing if you can find it is "Interceptor OR sentinel" which contains Milbemycin. I've used it in the past to halt tissue loss on Acans and have had Discoma Mushrooms recover from brown jelly.
Fluconazole though it wouldn't hurt to try, doubtful it will have any effect on that stuff. Thanks for the video, had no idea brown jelly was a living thing
Have fun and post results when you can

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

Hi everyone,

As there is very limited data concerning successful treatment options for brown jelly disease (BJD), I thought this would be a great opportunity to test some of the treatment options that have been anecdotally suggested. My wife and I have been busy all afternoon preparing slides and recording the progression of the disease at the macro and microscopic level from samples we harvested from one of our duncan frags (removed from the display). We're currently testing several treatment options in vitro, but I wanted to ask the community and see if anyone wanted us to test any specific compounds while we still have viable samples.

So far we plan to test different concentrations of:
metronidazole
lugol's solution
hydrogen peroxide
Bayer advanced complete insect killer
povidone iodine
RODI
bleach

Does anyone else have any other treatments options they would like tested? In addition if anyone has any specific experimental procedures they would like us to perform (such as concentration, time course, etc.) or other variables--let us know!

For a small sneak peak of our enemy, here's a quick TEASER


I've tagged twillard and Jason2459, but feel free to tag anyone else you think might want to add their input.
@twilliard @jason2459

How did you positively ID the Brown jelly as the disease and not just the appearance of a brown goo from coral die off. (its common)

The fluconazole is an anti fungal BTW.

 

[andrewey]

How did you positively ID the Brown jelly as the disease and not just the appearance of a brown goo from coral die off. (its common)

The fluconazole is an anti fungal BTW.

@saltyfilmfolks We tested the fluconazole mostly because it's been a few years since I've had brown jelly disease and since samples are hard to come by, I figured why not test it while we were testing every other conceivable treatment. I didn't expect much, but we tried to test all the commonly suggested treatments available to a reefer on short notice whether or not they had a plausible mechanism of action.

As for IDing BJD, it's not an exact ID, but given the rapid tissue loss over an hour, the spread to proximal LPS corals, and just my experience with IDing coral die off from BJD in the past, I felt relatively confident in removing the coral and viewing it under the microscope. Under the microscope, we saw the tens of thousands of these unique ciliates swarming the samples (never before seen in healthy or dying coral tissues or water/detritus samples) which also aligned with observations made by Eric Borneman concerning his work with BJD. We'll be posting videos and pictures of the protists if you want to ID what we observed.

 

[jason2459]

Highly interesting. Is that zoox they are consuming? From my phone and at that magnification thats what it looks like. For anyone that doesn't know zooxanthellae, a dinoflagellate, freshly expelled will not have their flagellum and will basically be immobile.

Can see lots of them here in my xenia up close
Pulsing Xenia: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_wI2B-a8voyAggXVL-kWpk3_IoyW3AF

 

[andrewey]

@jason2459 At first I thought it was only zoox, but we've found enough variation in the vaccules that I'm assuming they're also consuming the coenosarc and other components of the tissue. After watching them for long enough, it appears the protists are pretty non discriminatory in what they consume and pretty much only leave the calcium carbonate components alone.

It's funny- your posts, including your xenia series motivated my wife and I to upgrade our old microscope and begin photographing our findings. So in a sense, you're the one to blame for our new toy

 

[andrewey]

Heading to bed now, but will start updating the thread tomorrow with our findings. In the meantime, here's an unrelated clip we shot in between testing:

 

[Vaughn17]

Antibiotics will kill brown jelly. I don't recall the one that I used. From what I was told a few years back, it is commonly used by vendors. I have since decided that it is environmentally irresponsible to use it and no longer do.

 

[Macdaddynick1]

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/is-there-a-way-to-cure-brown-jelly-disease.280421/ This

 

[Pongo]

Test erythromycin please.
Or any macrolide you can get your hands on.

 

[andrewey]

Unfortunately we weren't able to get our hands on erythromycin before the brown jelly ran its course and we didn't have any more frags to sacrifice, however we did test azithromycin if you want to draw parallels from that. We will be posting our full list of antibiotics tested in our writeup.

 

[Pongo]

Azithromycin will do, it's a macrolide though maybe a little more expensive option.

Can't wait to read your results.
My LFS tells me erythromycin is his drug of choice for BJD after conferring with a marine biologist in Israel that did some successful testing with it.

 

[GoFish]

Any updates on how this test worked out?

 

[vertigo01]

I am curious to know the results as well.