Anchor Worm!

[Shadyr]

It's always that last step that is the doozy. I've been replacing silk plants in my little tanks with live ones, and in Chicory's case, the big fluffy silk plant was replaced a couple weeks ago with a sword. DONE, right?

Well no, I had a short quarantine on this, it's the tank in my office and I can't really have a QT tank there for new intros, so I put it in my salad bowl at home for a few days and called it good. It wasn't! Last Friday I saw little wormy things in the water and on the inside of the aquarium.

After some talk in the other forum, the likely culprits were identified as either roundworms or planaria, and in either case the fix was to starve them. To that end I took Chicory out of the tank (he's QT'd in a kritter keeper atm) and filled the tank with untreated water.

Well, some kinds of roundworms are worse than others, and I've been keeping an eye on Chicory closely...last night I saw one hooked on his side. His color is off and he seemed less active than usual, but that could be due to the change of environment. My big issue here is time. I leave for a weeklong family vacation Saturday, and I need this thing on him dead.

What's the best method of nuking an anchor/hookworm with fire? If you say tweezer it off, gonna need a how-to on sedating my boy, cause while Chicory was extremely co-operative last night, I could not get hold of it with my tweezers with him in a cup.

But I've read tweezers and Coppersafe are what can kill this.

Help me have him on the road to recovery by Friday so I can leave a recovering fish with our volunteer caretaker!

Current params

100% water changes daily
Keeping him in 1G of water in a kritter keeper as a QT tank
Temp is 78 (adjustable thermo - can go higher if it would help with this issue)
put AQ salt in, but can clear that and go to something more aggressive to kill this thing.

[Blue Fish]

I used coppersafe to cure an Ich infection and it cleared right up in a couple of days, and I know it says on there that it can be used to clear up other parasites as well, but I've not used it. :( I wish I could be more helpful! I know that copper also has natural antibiotic effects, rather like silver and aluminum, so I would think that would be a plus as well, just to make sure that it would help any lingering or progressing bacterial issues? I have read though on other sites that you don't want to use coppersafe and aquarium salt together though, one or the other. :)

Good luck to you, and I hope your little boy is feeling better ASAP!

[Shadyr]

Aye. AQ salt was what I had on hand - I will have to pick up the Coppersafe and clove oil today. Was planning on 100% changes daily anyway.

Thanks for the encouragement. I hope it works too! I'm missing him today, he's my office fish, and the thank just looks empty without him!