Can a Healthy Fish???

[LAReefer4Life]

Many people have different theories but can a healthy fish beat skin or gill flukes without treatment?

Curious to hear feedback on this topic point.

 

[Sharkbait19]

It can combat it early on, but it’s only a matter of time before it does reach dangerous proportions. Best to stop the problem early on and treat the fish.

 

[vetteguy53081]

May people have different theories but can a healthy fish beat skin or gill flukes without treatment?

Curious to hear feedback on this topic point.

There are fish that are resistant to disease but not immune. Going to your question, Having pristine water quality and diet is best prevention but as it is with we as humans, we carry viruses, etc and are susceptible from stress, lack of vitamins, poor diet and injury

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

May people have different theories but can a healthy fish beat skin or gill flukes without treatment?

Curious to hear feedback on this topic point.

They certainly can in the wild. In captivity, propagule pressure due to smaller water volumes often takes over, causing morbidity and mortality. If the fish show symptoms, you need to treat.

I had a case where a group of central American cichlids were housed for 2+ generations in a large naturalistic system. Few mortalities were noted over the years, mostly due to aggression. I sent 100 of these cichlids to another public aquarium and they began dying of gill flukes, despite not being exposed to any other fish. Turns out, our cichlids had been managing a latent gill fluke infection for years, across multiple generations with no losses. Moving the fish to a smaller system caused the gill flukes to become acute and fish began dying.

Then, there are Neobenedenia flukes that are capable of starting epizootics, even in large systems, from just a single egg...yikes!


Jay