Flatworms: Some Good News!
When I got home after work yesterday, I noticed my Goldflake Angel, Copperband Butterfly and to a smaller extent the Hardwicke wrasse all spending time under the branches of my affected corals and actually picking stuff off them. These fish have never exhibited this behavior in the past. Only when I started turkey basting did these fish sort of "learn" to hunt for the flatworms. When turkey basting the GF and CBB fight with each other to get into position under the corals to catch the flatworms as they blow off!
Each day there are less and less worms. However Dennis and I decided to pull out my Prostarata colony (one of the worst affected) to see if there were any eggs on it. We removed the colony and inspected it to find it infested with eggs, but soaking it in SeaChem only released one or two worms so the turkey basting/fish eating/fish-learning-to-hunt strategy seems to work.
We cut off the dead bottom of the prostrata that contained the eggs, and quartered the remaining colony. Each quarter was inspected for eggs, scraped, soaked in SeaChem, basted, soaked in SW, and glued onto the rock where it was originally (after cleeaning eggs off of the rock and soaking it in FW) and placed in my frag tank. There are 2 more colonies that are easily removable that will undergo this cleaning procedure.
All of my acro frags were inspected by both me and Dennis. To our surprise, there were no eggs found except for one grow-out colony: a pink millepora.
This colony was discarded since it was pretty much gone but first we soaked it in fresh water .......many many flatworms fell off. It was decided to discard this colony since I still have the mothercolony in the display, that seems not to be infected (no eggs or visible or worms flying off after basting) but will be treated via the turkey baster method.
The rest of the small acro frags were checked, dipped in SaeChem for around 30 minutes, blasted with a baster, soaked in SW to remove the SeaChem and placed into a sterile Q-tank separate from my system.
So I guess I will continue the turkey basting for any colonies not removable from my display, clean the removable ones, and keep the Q-Tank up and running as a last resort with hopefully "clean" frags to start over.
The main point here isthat certain fish love these worms as food and seemingly can be trained to hunt for them. Especially good at this task is the Goldflake Angel, Copperband Butterfly, and Hardwicke Wrasse that has already proven useful to German aquarists for purposes of FW eradication.