Hi and thank you. Yeah...I've had a 50 year history with fresh water tanks and since January, I've had more issues than I like to think about...I'm in Spokane, WA, and I also belong to a facebook group, Spokane Fish Group - or something like that. But, someone there thought that what I had the second time that I had something in that tank, was Epistylis. We had all bought fish from a supplier that had tons of sick fish. The first time that I realized that something was wrong was about 7 days after I introduced these mollies, two black, two dalmation, into a brand new tank that had cycled after 4 weeks and looked beautiful. Things were good, so good that I introduced a guppy that I'd had in a smaller tank, a female that had a couple of litters of fry while I had her and was getting pestered a bit too much from the other fish in the tank, into this tank. This was good for about 5 days. I really didn't notice anything odd until the after 13 days. I left that afternoon - they all ate well - and came back again at about 7 pm. The female guppy and one of the dalmation mollies were dead on the bottom of the tank. In the past, when I've seen issues, I've recognized them. 'Someone's fin is starting to go bald...someone or several someones have flakes of salt on them...' you know. So, having two dead fish in a tank was a shock. I would've blamed the guppy that I'd recently introduced except for that I'd had her for about 6 months and no one in the previous tank that she'd been in ever got sick much less died. I removed the fish and thought about it. The next morning, there was ich all over this tank and its inhabitants. Ich is rarely fatal and only fish with other issues succumb to it. So, I treated the tank, concurrently (thinking that there might be some bacterial issue) with Malachite Green and Erythromycin. When that treatment was done, the fish looked wonderful. For, about a week. Then, the white patches started showing up on both of the black mollies. Are you still with me? ? I have a hospital tank. It's not a quarantine tank because it's only 3 gallons. But, if a fish is sick, I can transfer it to this tank and treat it before the entire tank gets sick. So, first one black molly and then the other, I put them in this hospital and treated them with nitrofurazone, assuming that it was fungal. It worked. And, for the next several weeks, I had beautiful black velvet mollies. The remaining dalmation molly was fine all along. Yesterday, I see something trailing out of the anus of one of the black mollies and I see more gray patches and white dots on these two fish, AND the white dots are also on the remaining dalmation molly. Right now, I've got Prazinquatel in the tank and am holding off on more malachite green. The mollies, all of them, don't act like themselves. We'll see later when I feed them again tonight. On top of the apparent tape worm, the fish are again exhibitng more white grains on their surfaces. So, Ich...I think...I do know that this was a tape worm. I cleaned out the tank to about 50-75 % this afternoon and syphoned out the string of something that I was on one of the black molly's, it was a string of proglottids, little packets of tape worm seeds. It broke apart easily and was probably all shot to daylights from the Prazipro that I gave the tank yesterday afternoon. So, you might want to take this comment in pieces. A little here, a little there. But, I'm really sorry to hear about the camallanus worms. One of the members of this Spokane fish group had camallanus take out an entire tank.
Have you ever had experience with this? Did Prazipro do the job on stray egg sacs in your experience?
