Fluconazole - Bryopsis Silver Bullet?

[cnseekatz]

Nice, glad to see it's working for the GHA. 

 

 

[holy carp]

Bump...

 

Now that it's been a little while since this thread was started, we should have some better experience/knowledge on how lasting or temporary the effects of fluconazole are...  

 

Has anyone been seeing the bryopsis recur after treatment?

For those that treated GHA with it, have those come back?

[Mariaface]

7 minutes ago, holy carp said:

Bump...

 

Now that it's been a little while since this thread was started, we should have some better experience/knowledge on how lasting or temporary the effects of fluconazole are...  

 

Has anyone been seeing the bryopsis recur after treatment?

For those that treated GHA with it, have those come back?

 

Well! I had a bit of regrowth (bryopsis) on the shell of a hitchhiking bivalve. It was notably softer and couldn't keep its structure as well, so a couple of days later I replaced carbon and a hitchhiking limpet went to town on the patch of algae. I didn't even notice it as of yesterday, so it may be gone again  

[cnseekatz]

I have had no bryopsis grow back since treatment.

 

Also, all isolated incidents of GHA and bubble algae have disappeared. 

[cnseekatz]

I do have a bunch of this really short, bristly stuff on a few rocks. It's new(ish).

 

[vegasgundog]

I've noticed a shading of green in some places but the fiji and blue eyed tang are constantly scrubbing the rocks. Fighting cyano now. Ready to pull chemipure and drop the MOAB of chemiclean.

[niQo]

I've got some coming in the mail, hoping it will work as well as I keep reading!

[Pjanssen]

Yep, noticed the devil a couple of days ago. getting ready to redose

[holy carp]

16 hours ago, Pjanssen said:

Yep, noticed the devil a couple of days ago. getting ready to redose

Oh, disappointing news...

Can you summarize your course of treatment?  I think you started 3 months ago with 3 pills in 30 gallons, but I don't recall how the treatment progressed.

Removing carbon is standard, but how long did you stop skimming, not do water changes?  Did you continue to use socks/filter pads/mechanical filtration, gfo, biopellets during treatment?

 

[ashwin1224]

I got my hands on flucanozole, called fluca 150. However, its got a coating ponceau 4r on each tab. I read about it and it is a food safe dye. But I don't have any clue what will it do in a saltwater setting. What should i do?

[seabass]

14 minutes ago, ashwin1224 said:

it is a food safe dye. But I don't have any clue what will it do in a saltwater setting. What should i do?

Ideally, it wouldn't have any dye in it.  However, I'd still use it, and wouldn't worry too much about it.

[xthunt]

Ordered a 10 pack. I don't have bryopsis yet, but you never know. I do have suspicions about some tiny sprigs coming out of a tiny zoa frag. I'll probably try to do some surgery around it and remount a single polyp, cause I think the holdfast is under a polyp, or in the flesh. Putting this in the battle chest next to chemiclean and algaefix for safe keeping. 

 

It would be great if this could be used as a dip. Probably wouldn't work fast enough though. Maybe a quarantine treatment?

[seabass]

7 hours ago, xthunt said:

Maybe a quarantine treatment?

If you suspect bryopsis, then definitely.

[teenyreef]

For me, it was effective in getting rid of the particular strain of algae that had infested my tank and kept coming back. It took two applications, combined with changes in tank conditions that made my tank less algae-friendly in general, before it was eliminated. Three months later, I still get algae in the tank, but it's the "normal" algae that I'm used to seeing in any tank, not the kind that was killing all my corals.

[Pjanssen]

15 hours ago, xthunt said:

Ordered a 10 pack. I don't have bryopsis yet, but you never know. I do have suspicions about some tiny sprigs coming out of a tiny zoa frag. I'll probably try to do some surgery around it and remount a single polyp, cause I think the holdfast is under a polyp, or in the flesh. Putting this in the battle chest next to chemiclean and algaefix for safe keeping. 

 

It would be great if this could be used as a dip. Probably wouldn't work fast enough though. Maybe a quarantine treatment?

I wouldn't quarantine, I'd treat the whole tank because if you have it in one spot then you'll have it in several. It won't hurt any of your inhabitants.

[seabass]

16 minutes ago, Pjanssen said:

I wouldn't quarantine, I'd treat the whole tank because if you have it in one spot then you'll have it in several. It won't hurt any of your inhabitants.

True.

 

But if you suspect bryopsis on a new frag, by all means treat it in quarantine prior to introducing it into your display (versus subjecting your tank to it in the first place).

[teenyreef]

1 hour ago, seabass said:

True.

 

But if you suspect bryopsis on a new frag, by all means treat it in quarantine prior to introducing it into your display (versus subjecting your tank to it in the first place).

I'd be tempted to just throw the frag away unless it was either really expensive, or something that could tolerate multiple peroxide dips to make sure the bryopsis was really dead before it came out of the quarantine tank.

[Pjanssen]

2 minutes ago, teenyreef said:

I'd be tempted to just throw the frag away unless it was either really expensive, or something that could tolerate multiple peroxide dips to make sure the bryopsis was really dead before it came out of the quarantine tank.

Amen

[mcarroll]

On 5/9/2017 at 1:42 PM, holy carp said:

Has anyone been seeing the bryopsis recur after treatment?

For those that treated GHA with it, have those come back?

Relapse after treatment is the main bad feature – you still need to nail basic husbandry or you'll have a relapse of this or some other problem algae.  (DIno's are a favorite.)

 

Fluconazole:  Effective against ergosterol generation, it is.  A magic bullet it is not.

 

Other side effects have been macro algae loss and coral bleaching.

 

Check out the thread mentioned since it is so large and use the site search tools to find 2nd, 3rd, 4th treatments, etc. as well as other reported issues.  (There are LOTS of individual bryopsis threads there too if you're feeling dedicated like I was.)

 

Seems like nobody reads the whole thread, or if they do they're willing to write off every exception and re-treatment.  I feel like I'm a lot more conservative than that about what goes in my tank.

 

Corals have known fungal associates, but I don't think their role is understood....so that's a confirmed roll of the dice and potential explanation for the coral side-effects.

 

IMO this is a very bad use of a strong, environmentally-persistent medication in a situation where nobody is dying, starving or being hurt, and other avenues to remediation are available.

 

2¢

 

(If anyone is up for some reading, I've collected a little bit of research on my blog about Bryopsis.  Always welcome feedback on it too!)

[dishu1]

On 2/2/2017 at 8:21 PM, holy carp said:

I'm not sure if it's bryopsis that I have, or some other turf algae - it didn't respond to Tech M at all.

I just ordered some of this fish fluconazole to try out. Sounds like it can't hurt...

I'm having huge issues with exactly this species of algae after a salinity/alkalinity swing. Can't get rid of it. Reef HD Reef Flux doesn't work as well as it's demonstrated. I had all rocks covered with a thick carpet of this algae. I first hoped on a shortspine urchin, but he does nothing to this algae as it seems. Then I dosed 200 mg in my 20G + 10G sump, waited for a week and absolutely nothing happened. I made a 5.5G water change just in case, dosed 200 mg again. A large portion of the algae disappeared then, but after 3 weeks I still have a lot and it's apparently resistant to fluconazole. Last Sunday I made another water change because a lot of detritus got stuck in the algae and I just had to remove it, then I dosed 300 mg and now I'll wait for 2 weeks. If this doesn't work the only thing I could do is to replace all rocks and treat all frags with peroxide, but since I have a few SPS glued onto rocks I definitely don't wanna do that. 

[mcarroll]

3 hours ago, dishu1 said:

Reef HD Reef Flux doesn't work as well as it's demonstrated.

As if you came from the future to confirm my post from 2018 which is right above yours.  Thanks!!  👍😁

 

Why not a little bit of meditative, low-stress manual picking followed by a success story rather than treating the tank to a chemical smorgasbord and then nuking it altogether with a peroxide bath – and all the stress that goes along with all those defeats??? 

 

Focus your algae picking on a small area (eg. 1x1" or so) for 10-20 minutes and you could have it damn near spotless – good enough that snails could follow up on your work and keep it clean.  

 

Repeat as needed until the tank is clean – try to hit at least one area per day and try not to skip days.

 

If you see an area you've cleaned re-grow algae, then you need a few more snails – don't overdo it, but add some (usually 1-3 at a time), re-clean the area and see how it goes.

 

Repeat the hand pulling and snail-adding routines until you don't see algae re-growing – at which point you've won.  It shouldn't take more than a few iterations.