? Protozoa in discus

[ILLUSN]

I thought I'd put up a few pics for you all.

These pics i snapped at work using my new $20K capturing scope at work.

One of my fish has been passing fluffly white stools, this is what i found when i did a squash prep of the stools.

Andrew, any chance you can ID it for me? I assume the 2 flat regions of the top and bottom of the cell wall are where flagella attach. The only photos I can find of Spironucleus vortens are 3D electron micrographs.

I'll try and post more pics of other bugs as i find them

[DIY]

I have no experience with microscopes (not yet anyway) but this thread on another forum has scope pictures of something that looks very similar - could it be the same?

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showthread.php?t=62828&highlight=microscope

Mod's please remove this post if it's inappropriate to link to the "other" forum :wink:

Here's a link describing capillaria, and a photo of the worm with eggs inside, the description is "typical barrel-shaped eggs with a polar plug on each end"

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FA091

[ILLUSN]

Looks like them DIYjunkie, that would explain why i couldn't find the organisum in my protozoa referance material LOL.

they just had a dose of big L sunday night (I guess thats why I cant see any adult worms) will have to give a repeat treatment every 2 weeks I think to get rid of them?

[DIY]

Sounds reasonable to me, eggs take 3 weeks to develop at 68-73°F, so maybe 2 - 3 more treatments at 2 week intervals to be sure?

Pretty cool , thanks for posting the pictures - I didn't get the Microscope on evilbay I was looking at earlier, but this thread makes me still consider getting one!

[ILLUSN]

Tank specs are 4x2x2 (430L)
filtration eheim 2028, eheim 2228, 36w jebo UV DIY FBF (70cm tall 3kg of sand) temp 30C 50% water change daily

NH3/NH4 0
NO2 0
NO3 <5
kH~1
gH 60ppm
pH 5.5

at those temps i assume the eggs develop faster so I'll treat @2mg/L every 2 weeks for 2 more rounds that should get rid of them.

[Hollowman]

Super photos ILLUSN, and the second link was a good read too DIY

[Merrilyn]

Fantastic photos and really great information.

Well worth becoming a sticky.

[DIY]

Just a thought ILLUSN, do you have any pics of the "fluffy white stools" from this discus you can post?

Could be handy to correlate different types of "white" poops (err I mean stools :lol: ) to actual parasites

[ILLUSN]

Way ahead of you mate, unfortunately I used all the stools to make the slide, now it's pooping yellowy stools at the moment that look totally differant :( any way at least he's eating again, will add photos to this thread when my fish start again.

[fishgeek]

slow response and i would have suggested trichuris or capillaria as worm egg's - obviously i'm thinking mammalian so likely to be some other species
nematode so should respond to the usual options

protozoan flagella should be visible at the second power of magnification you show, sometimes taking the condenser down increase's edge enhancement in non-stained preperations, very nice images though

was the fish tank reared?

[ILLUSN]

yeah mate, near as i can tell these stools were from a blue diamond that went down hill after an asian red turk was introduced to the tank (after a 4 week quarentine).

will try and get more photos of the 2 fish in question, i saw the red turk passing white stools last night, buts its a good size and healthy, eats like a pig, but isn't the biggest fish in the tank (the way it eats you assume it would be I guess that should have tipped me off).

It got 2 doses of levimenisole while in quarentine 3 weeks apart, i guess i didn't break the cycle, wont make that mistake again.

[DIY]

Hmmm... my new microscope arrived today so I took a sample of white stool from a Juvi I recently purchased.

Took me a while to find anything but I found this. My scope and camera aren't up to the quality of ILLUSN's above put it looks the same to me.

It's not a heavy infection from what I can tell, only really found one - but where there's one there must be more... Big-L teatment coming up!

[ILLUSN]

G'day all, bad news, my rose red fry are VERY sick took a look at some stools under the work scope and i think i found every internal paracite known to mankind

first off the worms the live worms are about 1mm long

[ILLUSN]

heaps of internal bugs, if anyone can id them I'd me very appreciative

[ILLUSN]

smaller rounder bugs that appear to be fully cilliated

[ILLUSN]

more protozoa of various sizes these bigger guys appear to be round the 100um mark

[ILLUSN]

last ones for now nice big ugly bug!

i did notice some spironucleus present but in VERY low numbers maybe 4 in the entire stool sample not 100's like the rest of these things.

[ILLUSN]

the end result of this is 14 fish dead, and as luck would have it all the bigger (3 inch) rose red fry are gone as are all the red turk fry.

I've treated with OCTOZIN (8.5% dimetridazole) at 3x the bottle dose, have also started weekly treatments of levimenisole at 2mg/L no more deaths after a week and stoll samples show only eggs and DEAD protozoa (in the 1000's). hopefully the remaing 11 fish will make a full recovery, all are eating again, freeze dried blackworms and live brine shrimp, they still have no taste for beefheart or any dry foods (specrun grow color bits breeders blend flake).

again if anyone can help me id these bugs it would be greatly appreciated

[ILLUSN]

this is driving me up the wall fish were looking great now some have gone down hill again, a quick look at worst fish poo shows 1000's of these bugs.

so far fish have had treatments with prazi (bottle dosage three treatments 5 days apart) 3 doses of levimenisole (1 week apart) a 2x dose of octozin (2x the bottle dosage adminstered as per instructions days 1 2 and 3) and metro in the food,

if anyone has any ideas please let me know.

[DIY]

ILLUSN,

Check out this webpage, it's got some scope pics of various parasites, some of them look similar to yours.. but it's hard to be sure :?
http://thegab.org/Links/UFla/Parasites.html

Your picture protlowb.jpg looks similar to Protoopalina symphysodonis on that page, the size seems right and it's a gastro tract parasite.. so could be right

Here's another site with microcope pics of aquarium parasites to look at.
http://www.geocities.com/steevward/pathogens.html

The worms & eggs look like they could still be Capillaria, your microscope is picking up much more detail than mine and the pics in the sites I've linked.. but they sort of look similar to me :ug

Sorry I can't help more... too much of a microscope newbie myself... at least that's my excuse :lol:

As for what to do.. to be honest I don't know :scratch

I guess you could try making the environment hostile to the bugs like maybe dropping the pH down quite low :ug
Something I've been thinking about trying is feeding rocksalt. I saw this done in a discus book and was surprised Discus would even eat it. I imagine it would get concentrated salt into the intestinal tract and most f/w bugs don't like high salt concentrations

[ILLUSN]

Thanks for the link DIY, by size i think your right, i'm sure the worms are capillaria, the eggs give it away, i'll keep up the levimenisole till they go, PH is 5.0, will try to bring it down to 4.8, i've been adding salt at 1tsp/20L. guess i can just wait and see.