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Pinched Mantle disease


ZephNYC

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A clam without exposure to PM will not contract it. However, clams can have PM and not show symptoms for months.

 

For example: a storefront has a shipment of clams come in from an area where PM is currently affecting the population of tridacna sp. and they place those new clams in the same aquarium as the shipment of clams they had received 6 weeks ago from an area where PM is not prevalent. The new clams can easily pass PM to the clams that did not previously have it, and due to the healthy state of the clams that just contracted PM from the new shipment, they will likely show no symptoms at all for up to 3 months.

 

This is the reason quarantine is so important when bringing new clams into your collection.

 

Your'e right...3 months is better than 2. Better safe than sorry. Like I said, Patience was never one of my virtues.

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It's not like fish that can carry dormant parasites for years or even a life time without ever getting a symptom. It is introduced for sure and It doesnt stay dormant for long, or at all in my opinion. If it is in there it is chewing on your mantles and your clam(s) will show it in a month or so, usually. It has to to survive. So the glass is actually half full because if you qt a clam for 8 weeks and it still looks great you can be confident it is clean. The hard part is waiting 8 weeks to put her in your display. Patience is not one of my virtues. lol.

 

IME Smaller clams (especially younger clams) succumb to PM faster.

Longest I have had a clam go with PM and not show it was 45 days, although I have heard stories of them taking longer to show it.

 

PM Usually onsets quicker on clams in the trade because of physical stress during transport and moving from one system to another.

 

I am not that patient by nature either lol... bad experiences have scared me into being patient!

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altolamprologus

Hey Zeph, would it be beneficial to give new clams a FW dip before quarantining as a preventative if they're not showing symptoms? Or would it just stress them out too much?

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Actually Perkinsus is not pinched mantle at all. Daniell Knop Quotes" Infections by species of Perkinsus are normallly found in the digestive track. No typical syptoms of the infection are known" He also says : infections by Perkinsus show no signs.

 

 

James Fatheree quotes in his book " giant clams in the sea and in the aquaerium -" A protozoa by the name of Perkinsus has been found in the digestive tract of crocea, maxima and gigas ( goggin & Lester 1987) and will lead to a clams death in bad situations. But there are no diagnostic symptoms that you can identify, and there is no recommended treatment even if you could." other

He also says " another UNIDENTIFIED PROTOZOA can invade the mantle tissue and destroy zooxanthellae" - This is pinched mantle disease.

 

We have documented Perkinsus in other tissue of clams, including the mantle. I've seen them myself under the scope, from T. gigas, T. squamosa, T. derasa, and T. maxima. It causes pinched mantle symptoms and these are relieved (not cured) by freshwater dips. This is not to say that all pinched mantle is caused by Perkinsus or that it is the only protozoan involved.

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Hey Zeph, would it be beneficial to give new clams a FW dip before quarantining as a preventative if they're not showing symptoms? Or would it just stress them out too much?

 

HI!!! We are definitely going to cover that in detail...and lots of other fun stuff. In my opinion, no. I wouldnt dip a clam unless it showed the tiniest symptom of PM. Like TJ said, clams are pretty stressed out by the time they get to our vendors. They have been ripped out of their world, traveled half way around the globe and spent many nights in strange places. A dip at this time would be twice as hard on it. Dont dip unless you are sure you need to.

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Forum N00b gets a sticky omgomgomg

You said you were going to document it and you did. \

Hope the big clam feels better. keep posting.

:flower:

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Your'e right...3 months is better than 2. Better safe than sorry. Like I said, Patience was never one of my virtues.

 

Actually, I take that back..I have a Regal angel that i have had in qt for almost two years..but i guess one might call that a species tank. Im scared to put him in the reef.

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Thanks Lani,

 

Zeph and I are going to continue expanding on this; cover some other ailments that have PM-like symptoms that are not actually PM and how to ID and treat them.

out

Indeed, And thank you for your help and insight Tj. I have already been PM'ing with several members that were concerned about their clams, and most of them did NOT need a dip, so yea...we need to talk about it. We dont want people dipping clams that dont need it.

 

Hey MetroKat..I know where you will be this afternoon..He he heee...i might stop over and nap your little clammmm.

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Hey MetroKat..I know where you will be this afternoon..He he heee...i might stop over and nap your little clammmm.

 

+1 for Napping her little clam..

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No.

 

Exactly,

 

Please stay on topic guys - I am going to get the mods to remove inappropriate posts on this stickied thread. This is to be used for the discussion and treatment of PM only.

 

Thank you.

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Now that this has become a stickie ( Thank you TJ), we need to start with the FACTS and not opinions. So to get things in proper order lets talk about what actually causes the disease and new information I have come across.

 

According to a report from the Aquatic Animal Health Laboratory of Maine, 2009

 

"Pinched mantle syndrome as we describe it, is likely caused by Perkinsus olseni and possibly another unidentified species that parasitize a tremendous variety of mollusks throughout the world. The parasite probably originated in the Indo Pacific region and is now undergoing GLOBAL EXPANSION. It has been detected in Europe and most recently South America. It is not clear exactly how it arrived in the western hemisphere, but most likely was transferred through contaminated shellfish. It is considered a reportable disease by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).

 

Shockingly, Perkinsus are very closely related to malaria and toxoplasma parasites of humans.The first species of Perkinsus was described in 1946 from a massive oyster die out in Louisiana (Ray 1996). Perkinsus olseni was not described until 1980 as a parasite in abalone colonies in S. Australia. So you see, this parasite is hot and new and has only been recognized the last 35 years or so. This is why so much is unclear because there is not much funding for this type of research.

 

Going against what I believed earlier, it is proposed that there is three life stages of the pathogen, and it does indeed have a dormant stage .It is called a TROPHOZOITE, and it is the vegetative form that persists within the tissue of the host clam.

"It is reasonable to consider that a carrier state may exist in clinically normal clams

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Once you receive a new clam, how long would it take to show up in a system that has never had a clam in it? Basically, after how long would it be safe to say you don't have the disease in you system and your new clam is clean?

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Once you receive a new clam, how long would it take to show up in a system that has never had a clam in it? Basically, after how long would it be safe to say you don't have the disease in you system and your new clam is clean?

 

I always felt 2 months QT was good, but The consensus is 3 months and your clam is clean. All the shipping your clam has been through will stress it enough that if it IS carrying, it will USUALLY show up pretty quickly, as in weeks.

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Once you receive a new clam, how long would it take to show up in a system that has never had a clam in it? Basically, after how long would it be safe to say you don't have the disease in you system and your new clam is clean?

 

My comfortable time frame is 3 months with no symptoms at all.

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Hey Zeph, would it be beneficial to give new clams a FW dip before quarantining as a preventative if they're not showing symptoms? Or would it just stress them out too much?

 

Alto, I feel the need to address your question again. Like I said, Your clams are pretty stress out by the time you see them, and it would be a really bad time for a FWD. However, it is well known that crocea clams can tolorate FWD's better than other species and i have known vendors to dip entire new batches of croceas, but no other clams. ALso it is not wise to dip a clam under 2 inches.

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Here are two new beauties I picked up at the frag swap from Dr. Mac. THey have been in QT for 1 week. So far so good.

max1j.jpg

max2e.jpg

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Do you need to worry about dwarf cerith snails climbing all over the clam?

 

Not really...but i will tell you couple of months ago I purchased a few tiny (dwarf?) Nasarius snails and I caught them messing with my clam, causing it to pinch. It was not like a turbo snail just cleaning, it was literally digging in, between the mantle and the shell. Now the theory is they are just cleaning it, and no worries, but I have seen too many snails burrow inside clams so i was not going to stand for this and i literally threw them out the window. WHat is really funny is how easy it was to find 5, half inch BURROWING SNAILS in a 125 because they all came out of nowhere and were all literally RUNNING ( as fast as a snail can run) to the one clam I had in there like they could smell it. As if some symbiotic relationship existed and it had to have in. And that scared me. Cerith, as well as nasarius snails should not harm your clam, but anything that bothers a clam at all is not something i want in my tank. A clam can get bothered often enough to stop opening.

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Thanks. The snails are everywhere. Just worried about them getting stuck or hungry.

 

BTW Those are some beautiful clams.

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I received a couple of pm's asking if this could be an area of concern and an eary symptom of PM

 

max2edit.jpg

 

Sure, it could be. But most clams that reach 5 inches plus carry a wrinkle or two when they are perfectly healthy. As it looks today, it is fine with me. Of course I will inspect it daily, and if it gets even the slightest bit worse, i will dip it immediately.

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So lets do a follow up on my sick Gigas clam. This is an interesting case to me because Gigas clams were considered immune to PM. Just my luck, MINE would be the first case anyone I know has heard of. I even called in the master on this one, and Barry said he has never heard of a Gigas getting PM, and when his entire facility got wiped out, only the Gigas clams remained seemingly uneffacted. My 2 Gigas clams remained strong, and seemingly unaffected, even when 47 clams of various other species all perished.

 

This is what it looked like before the first dip when it first got sick.

20120501151957724.jpg

 

 

So I gave it a FWD on May 2 for just 20 minutes and man did that dip do alot of damage. It really tore the mantle up. Now obviously these clams have BIG THICK mantles, so even though I was expecting a longer recovery time, I was expecting results. However, a full three weeks later and it looked the same. This is how it looked after the first dip, and pretty much for the next three weeks.

 

20120529091440855.jpg

 

Nasty !!! It hurts just to look at that clam. At the start of the second week post dip, I did notice it looked a little better first thing in the morning. Every day I would think " Ahhhh..shes coming around". But by the early afternoon she looked miserable again. Retraction from the light being too strong for a damaged mantle.

So I decided to put a screen over the infected area, dimming the light only that part of the clam was receiving. Perhaps 1200W's of halide is too much for a sickly mantle.

 

So as I am writing this, it has been 3 weeks since dip # 1, and it is time for the grand finale of a longer more drastic second dip. I felt this clam was very healthy for the most part and approximately 50 % of the mantle appears damaged. The healthy 50% bounced back great from the first dip and is fully expanded. At Barrys advice I used 100% Reverse osmosis water. I know I said not to, and to use tap, and that IS what all the books say, but at Barrys advice (This is exactly what he said.

" Nuke the b*tch and use straight RO") I used ro. What about the drastic drop in hardness ?? Why bother adjusting the ph?? PH shock will kill in seconds...the hardness drop might be more stressful sure, but more stressful to the pathogen as well. So we used 100% RO water, increased the PH to 8.4 and sank the 20 inch clam for a full 35 minutes. I was feeling better already. I am expecting result....eventually.

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Every time I dip a clam I expect some evil monster to slither out like a creature from the black lagoon....an evil thumb splitter or some other possible explanation.

 

I will take pictures every week to check for improvement. I went down late tonight (I just dipped her this morning) to examine her night time behavior and i believe she is looking better already! However I can be pathetically optimistic.

Also I have heard that PM is now refered to as "clam cancer", even in scientific journals. The Perkinsus Olseni pathogen is responsible for so many clam ailments, including gaping and sudden death syndrome that almost every clam ailment is being blamed on PM.

On a lighter note, every laugh at something that is so obvious you never even notice it? One of my best friends pointed out something silly that has me giggling every time I think of it. My real name is Marc. If you spell that backwards what does it ALMOST say?

 

Ps. Here is a pic of my other healthy 30 inch Gigas clam. If it gets sick I will jump out the window.

067yh.jpg

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