Hi, ya still fighting those little things. Getting ready to do round 4 of the FW exit. Great advice given above by
@Oscaror and
@reef lover. My situation was probably out of the norm, we had thousands before we realized what was going on and we didn't realize we had thousands until we started treating. The first time was a little scary and nerve wracking, now its a walk in the park.
Sipon out as many as you can as mentioned. You can use a small filter sock to catch them in while your vacuuming so you don't loose any water during that step. The instructions calls out having enough water to do a 25% water change, I recommend having double that on standby (we had to do an additional emergency change). Even if you dont use the extra water you can use it for your next WC. I also recommend having some prime on hand. A couple of hours after treatment we experienced an amonnia spike. We test for the spike every 30 minutes for the first two hours then once an hour for 2 or 3 more hours after treatment. The initial treatment was the only time we experianced the spike, I think it was due to the large number of worms in the tank.
They are toxic when they die off. I also recommend a very fine net or something to catch them as the float in your water column. We used a small fine woven fish net and it seemed to work great. After catching the majority of floaters we turkey basted the rocks and vacuumed the sand. You will never get them 100% cleaned out so don't stress if you see a few after vacuuming.
The directions say to start your carbon and filter when you see them die, usually 10 minutes in they really start dropping and dying. I have observed some moving down into the sand to escape the poison, I am thinking that's how some survived the first few treatments. On this past treatment I worked the sand a little along the glass to help expose some. I plan to let it work a little while longer on this next round before I introduce the carbon. I will share how that goes.
We did loose a clown but I'm not convinced it was due to the treatment, I think he hurt himself while everything was going in in his house. We have since added a Wrasse it does eat some, but the population is still higher than I would like to see in ours. Note, we have not lost anything in our tank during the treatments other than the clown mentioned.
This was my experience so far, I hope this helps,feel free to ask more questions.
