I don't know how it happened...but I discovered two AEFW's tonight. I saw some very suspicious bite marks on my red dragon Acro that have become worse throughout this week. Just bought some Melafix online so I can knock them out sooner rather than later. I don't know where they came from since my last frag was bought more than 3 months ago. Found a good article on acropora eating flatworms however. "The Life Cycle of the Acropora Coral-Eating Flatworm (AEFW), Prosthiostomum acroporae; The Influence of Temperature and Management Guidelines"
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2019.00524/full
Assuming the lowest temperature and highest temperature my tank MIGHT swing, eggs would take 11 to 15 days to hatch and 31 to 56 days to reach sexual maturity. Given 1-2 days for a larval settling period, I'm looking at 17 days between the first and second dose. The plan is to treat as soon as the Pond strength Melafix arrives, followed by a second treatment on the 18th day at 50mL/g of pond strength Melafix. Given my unfounded paranoia with this pest, I will do a third dose another 17 days later. I have used Melafix in the past for monti-eating nudibranchs with some success, but it killed quite a few acros in the process. Hopefully I have better luck this round.
Most of my acros are thoroughly encrusted on my rockwork, so I will be pulling the rock structures out and dipping them entirely for 4 to 8 minutes while blasting with a powerhead. I noticed several holes between some of the frags and the rocks, I will be filling those in with glue or epoxy, entrapping any stow-away's I can't blast off the rock. I will lose all the sweet feather dusters I have on the rock work, but it is a necessary purge at this point.
You can observe exposed skeleton on this red dragon acro on its lower right side near the JF jack-o' Lantern leptoseris.
Reference:
Wanted to know if i could dip the acros in melafix pond every 3 days for 5 weeks?
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I have a frag system running that has AEFW. The in-tank purge treatment did not work. I just moved to a new house and have a new system up and running that is ready for corals. I want to take frags of the corals in my frag tank and place them in the new tank. My plan was to dip and frag...
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