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I believe I have red bugs and could use some advice

alve

alve

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Alright, I was checking my frags in the frag tank tonight and noticed tiny reddish-brown dots on a ORA Scripps Green stag frag that were moving around.

Is there anything else than red bugs that could look like tiny reddish-brown dots?

Beginning this year I asked my cat's vet for Interceptor, explained her everything and showed her info I had printed out but she did not want to give me a prescription for it. I wanted to get it for treating any new frags but since she didn't want to give me a prescription I have only used TMPCC or the iodine samples I got from the BAR meeting but these do nothing to get rid of red bugs on new frags.

Since I suck in taking pictures I will still try to get a picture when I get home from work tomorrow.

Should I do an Interceptor treatment on the whole system? I know I would loose my pods and peppermint shrimp.

Also, anyone who could help me get interceptor since my vet doesn't want to do it? I would pay for it off course.

I am supposed to bring quit a lot of DBTC frags to the December meeting but I can imagine that people would not want them at this time.
 
What I would do is set up a small QT tank, toss a ball of chaeto or whatever from your refugium in there to save some of your pods, try to catch your shrimp (use food if you have to) toss them in as well. And yeah, full tank treatment, unless you have a small number of acroporas that you can remove instead.
 
I will set up a QT tank this week and do the treatment. Mike, if you take out a ball of chaeto to save some pods wouldn't you have a chance to reintroduce the bugs again after treatment when you put the chaeto back into the refugium?
 
You could, but depends how long you keep them in the QT, not quite sure the lifespan of them though, but without a food source I can't imagine they'd live very long, could be wrong on that though.

However when I treated for redbugs after the fact I noticed some "pods" some time later, but then again I used close to the recommended amount and didn't go balls to the wall and "nuke my tank"
 
The other option that some live with is to not do anything as far as treatment. I am not by any means saying that this is the right route but you might also read up on living with them to make a good decision as to which way you want to go.
 
That is very interesting. I did read comments from people on red bug treads that they don't treat their tank because they say it doesn't harm their corals. I thought they would cause less polyp extension, slow down growth and possibly kill the coral.
 
I have read some of them too. I would say the best thing if nothing else it to visually inspect your corals....do I see lots of bite marks, are they visually causing stress to the corals, do I see a decrease in growth, etc. personally being the anal person I am I would probably want to do something about it to help me sleep better at night but just know that nuking your tank is not the only option.
 
Being as there is a fairly easy method for whole tank treatment red-bug eradication I'd say just kill them. Something like AEFW... no real treatment you can do, others "just live with them" but hey, everyone has a different methodology to their tanks which is great.
 
Just for piece of mind I will go ahead and treat the whole system. I will feel better knowing they are not there anymore.
 
Tomorrow I will have interceptor and will try to catch the 6 peppermint shrimp (will be a pain I am sure) so I can start the treatment.

This is what I will do (thanks a lot for the info Jeremy!):
Day 1: strong dose Interceptor
Day 2: 25% water change (24hrs after dose)
Day 4: regular dose Interceptor
Day 5: 25% water change (24 hrs after dose)

Jeremy explained me the reason why this is different from the original red bug treatment and I thought this might be useful for anyone who might ever have to deal with red bugs:
"A few things have come to light recently since Dustin's treatment method has been published. It's not so much the strength of the dose it is the duration that the little beasts are in contact with the drug. It's been found that the little bastards are live bearing and have a 3-5 day life cycle, to break the cycle I dose again on day #4"
 
Good luck man.. Hopefully you won't lose coral...
I think it's much cheaper to buy new shrimp. The amount of time you spend to catch those shrimps worths a lot more than 6 shrimps ;D ..
 
Thanks Phong. I believe I found out in time. So far all corals still looks good so I don't think I will loose anything except the pods and most likely the peppermint shrimp because those things are unbelievably fast.

It does help catching a problem fast when spending a lot of time in front of the tank every evening checking out everything ;D
 
Alve - Were you able to take pictures before you started your treatment? Be good reference to see before and after shots if possible. Good luck with the treatment and hope you come thru with as little impact to your tank as possible. Doug
 
So the first dose of interceptor has been done tonight. Tomorrow a 25% water change, on Friday the second dose and Saturday 25% water change and hopefully everything is taken care off :)

Anyone who needs to do some trimming on his/her chaeto that could bring it to the meeting to reintroduce some pods? That would be greately appreciated.

Doug, I took some pictures, very hard to see them but this one should work:
redbugs.jpg
 
Alve - Thanks for including a picture. Wow...they are very small and that would be tough to see normally. Were they moving on the coral or if you tried to poke them would they move or fall off? Thanks.
 
Doug, they are very small but you can see them move around. That's how I noticed it.

Time for an update so far:

This morning around 6am I noticed one death peppermint shrimp on the sand and removed it. To my surprise I also found 2 dead green chromis (one on the sand, the other stuck to the intake of one of the tunzes). I removed them as well and couldn't see the 3rd one since the lights were off.

When I got home from work tonight I noticed that the 3rd green chromis is nowhere to be seen, all other fish are acting like nothing is going on and look just fine. This seems very strange to me, I never heard or read about interceptor killing chromis. Just weird that suddenly all three are dead and yesterday they were all doing as usuall and eating like pigs. The only reason I can imagine is the interceptor.

The positive news is that I have not seen any red bugs anywhere and I inspected the frag from the picture with a magnifying glass.

I will be doing the 25% water change in a few minutes and on Friday another dose of interceptor.
 
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