Prazi Pro and Bacteria Bloom

veselym · Nov 21, 2014

I had 2 fish in my 180 with flukes, keep in mind I only have 7 fish in the entire system so far...I dosed prazi pro last Monday and let it run on a 4 day cycle then did 2 25G water changes and was running carbon until Sunday when I dosed again for the second treatment.

Well the second treatment caused a huge bacteria bloom, tank is super cloudy and white stringy crap everywhere. The fish are still swimming around happy and eating but my corals look shriveled. I have been doing daily 25G water changes since Monday and it is still cloudy

I tested parameters yesterday and they are as follows:

N03: 1ppm
Salinity: 1.025
Temp: 79.4
PH: 8.01
Alk: 9.9
Cal: 400
Mag: 1260

There is no ammonia or nitrites so everything is in a healthy range other than Mag which is a tad low. I have been running carbon for the past 2 days but my skimmer is still going nuts even though I have swapped over 100G's of water, so at least 50% of the volume.

Not sure if my tank is crashing or not but it blows because I have over 1K of LPS in the system and it is not getting clear.

any suggestions??

veselym · Nov 21, 2014

should I remove my coral? I have a 40G breeder as a QT tank but it has no fish in it or ever had chemicals...I have a reefbreeder fixture and ATO on it with a sump

Kworker · Nov 21, 2014

I have heard its fine to use Prazipro in a reef tank but I never felt comfortable enough to do so. I use it all the time in my Quarantine tanks, there were instances where it did cause clouding in the water. I think its fairly common for cloudiness when using Prazi, I am not sure what the stringy stuff is.

I would think the best remedy would be keep up the water changes.. I am sure I don't have to suggest treating any fish in a QT in the future haha. Best of luck..

MattL22 · Nov 21, 2014

I treated my 220 and suspect it did throw tank outta wack a little I didn't get any white stringy stuff though are u dosing any type of carbon ??

Randy Holmes-Farley · Nov 21, 2014

I have heard of bacterial blooms when people use it, and they often attribute it to the solvent the medication is dissolved in.

I'm not sure what is in it, but dosing a substantial amount of organic carbon all at once will cause a bacterial bloom.

I'd just keep up the aeration but not remove corals.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Nov 21, 2014

FWIW, it says it contains a substantial amount of oxybispropanol (shown below) which could drive bacterial growth:

TruRacr314x · Nov 21, 2014

I've definitely been hit by cloudy water with Prazi...only in my QT tank though. I did have LPS in there once with a Goldflake...mainly to test his appetitie for such. The corals did look unhappy, but everything cleared up in a relatively short time. No long term effects to the coral. I kinda assumed cloudy water killed the PAR?

veselym · Nov 21, 2014

maybe it did kill the PAR...it has been cloudy for 5 days now and no I am not dosing any carbon/vodka, I haven't put anything in the tank other than carbon and WC's

veselym · Nov 21, 2014

the prazi doesn't seem to be working either...both my blenny and fox face still have cloudy eyes

Randy Holmes-Farley · Nov 21, 2014

Sorry, about the fish.

I don't know enough about curing fish diseases to suggest other methods.

Mike&Terry · Nov 21, 2014

We had an incident where flukes made it into our display several years ago and ended up running Prazi for 5 weeks to finally beat it. 5 days medicate/ 1 day 25% water change/skim/activated carbon and repeat. We also did a water change midway thru and added prazi to the new saltwater water before adding the water to the tank. We kept up aeration by removing the collection cups on our skimmers and also added a couple air stones.

Our water was a bit cloudy and yellow (our sumps were really messy) and many of our SPS browned out a bit, but we lost nothing. Once the treatment was over, we did a couple of larger water changes, skimmed hard, ran activated carbon and used a couple of polyfilters to help clean up the water. It took our SPS corals about 3 weeks to color back up.

For what it's worth, a freshwater bath matching temp and pH would help you determine if the cloudy eyes are caused by flukes and also aid in removing them (the flukes). A sleeping foxface in the the middle of the night isn't too hard to catch. Just a thought.