Malachite and formol or salt treatment ?

[MikeM]

You have a scope! Great!!

Confirming one problem is a good first step. There may be something more, but take one at a time. Also, remember that the medications are all stressors themselves. So, take your time before deciding to use another. A few people report having problems when they use salt with Supaverm, but most experience no problems. I suspect overdosing with Supaverm combined with salt may be involved in the bad experiences, but do not know. (Most people over-estimate their pond volume if they do not meter a fill-up.) Although most have no problems, I would wait a couple of days after using Supaverm before adding salt. Do not use anything else with Supaverm until the 10 day treatment period is concluded and you have done a water change. Hopefully, nothing more is needed.

Good luck!

[marco]

So, here are the last news of my problem.

I treat the flukes with supaverm but the sickness continue to contaminate others koï. I phone to my Koi dealer and he said that he also had an oïdium problem, the best solution for him was to treat the pond with formalin and malachite (three treatment , one each two days) . Of course my filtre has to be re feed with bactogen , but all my koi are now in perfect conditions and the littles white ulcer desepear from all of them without lmeaving any injury.
I don't post any pict because I don't want to stress them more, but once again thank to all people who gaves me good advices
Marco

[bekko]

Their response sounds like it could have been the dreaded salt-tolerant Costia. Can you tell us what the concentration of formalin and malachite was? Are these fish from Japan?
-steve hopkins

[ranskye]

hey steve, i dont know what he used but our doses for formalin are 25ppm for light dose, 40ppm for a good dose, and sixty if your careful and really wanna nail something. im interested in his dose rate too.

[marco]

Hei Bekko,

I use a mixture made with one litre of Formaline (a solution with 35 % formaldehyde) and 3.3 grames of green malachite.
In my pond I put 15 ml of the mixture for 1000 litre (my pond has about 12000 litre and I put 180 ml each two days and this, 3 times).
I had no sign of toxicity on the fish, but a put massive oxygen in the water from the day before the first treatment until two days after the last one.
I increase the temperature to 20 degree with a heater system and they had only a little food only the days without treatment and only once a day, just to see if the apetite was stil there.
That must be a concentration of 15 ppm of formaline and 0.05 ppm of green malachite, but I leave the week end to control ..

I bought a kin kikokuryu a few month ago, coming from Japan and he was one of the first to be hill, so it could be a costia problem . But I never detect them on microscope and I try a few time without results. Could be my foult that I did not see them, but I use the microscope every day in my work and I normaly know how to find such protozoaire.

I think I will never know for sure what was my problem, and that is a little frustration, but what a pleasure to see them getting better after only two days treatment.
So have a nice week end and enjoy your koi

[koiloco]

Medicines are expensive especially when your pond is big.

I would do the following

1. STOP covering your pond
2. TURN OFF your heater
3. CHANGE about %20 of your water
4. ADD as much aeration as you have
5. NUKE the pond with a 2ppm Potassium Perm. treatment cycle

6. CHANGE another %20 of your water.
7. SALT TO 0.3
8. Inject the infected ones to prevent infection.
9. SIT BACK and WATCH.

My approach might not be a gentle one and might cause a little stress on your fish. But come on, koi are not that fragile.

Don't waste your money on all the mumbo jumbo medicines. Keep your water in top shape and your pond clean + a good QT discipline for new fish. You would have nothing to worry about.

[marco]

Koiloko, that an other approach that could work too, but I think that once you have a problem like that and that every day you have two or three others kois with new injury, you have to use such medicine to stop the problem quickly,even if it cost a little money. It had cost me less then the value of my smaller koi.
I 'm agree with you with the water quality importance, and with the use of a QT that I have just finish to install.

[ranskye]

ive noticed with many and also myself that it takes many lessons to learn that preventative is the best way.
the main thing is as long as you learn to prevent in the end and not to rely on treatment.

its often through death and disease that you learn what you can and cant get away with.
if in the early part, good practise was followed, youd never need the chemical treatments.

sure thay have their place in saving fish. but its best if their use is seen as something not to be common place.

[koiloco]

awesome idea!

how long have you been keeping koi? ranskye

[ranskye]

im only a young bloke, just entered my 30's..my old man has kept a pond of koi for 15 years. wed run them babies in our swimming pool, then we got two 5000L fibreglass tanks, worked on trickletowers and foam fractionator and venturies.
also worked a few thousands litre tanks and even a coupla hundred litre ones too.
its really surprising how many fish you can run in a two hundred litre tank with good filtration without them needing any chemicals whatsoever, if you keep an eye on the water too. thats the problem they can be temperamental.
it showed me how small volumes can be fine one minute and swing to the extreme fairly fast. particularly with native fish that are used to stable ocean or rivers. koi and goldfish are comparitivley tough.

i was really more just a fisherperson, then five years ago i threw my job in at a factory and studied aquaculture, the main reason was cause i was sick of smelling chemicals in the factory! i really noticed it when i was sick.
id hate the thought of something not natural, the smell, i once ate a burger that had solvent splashed on it. itd be in my clothes and i was sure it was finding its way through my skin into my blood.
once i got set on fire when i spilled pure alchohol on my leg, once i found a co worker holding a 44 gallon drum from being completey emptied with his hand. funny to see but bloody dangerous.

from there i went to a bass farm under one of my teachers, i had a drum of formalin spilled down my leg and that kinda peed me off after it burned and i read the label and found that it causes cancer.
it was common practise to use it sparingly at the time.
im sure when i was at aqua school they said that malchite green and methalene blue had been banned form food fish and aqua farms.. still i see it in aquarium shops.
the class watched a film on a pond being treated with the stuff. it just looked so bloody wrong!.

anyway then it was off to a goldfish/koi/livebearer farm for two years as co manager, thats where the money was, in peoples pets and not peoples food.
i worked there two years. wed sometimes use salt from the creek and another powder on argulas a parasite like a tick, it was quick effective but guess what? not good for humans either..

Then i got interested in a real huge farm, not casue i hated chemicals but cause i had visions of huge numbers of fish.
off i went as manager, though that turned out to be very hard to run becasue of its design and lack of power and pumps.
i saw a fair amount of dead fish through inexperienced people overstocking tanks, i think they soon learned.. a case of recently harvested and stressed fish into bad water never works. its funny, i remember one guy not knowing you couldnt leave a bucket of fish sitting there with no air stone.
it shows that time and bad experiences are good lessons, we shall just put some air on that one hey mate!.

it made me realsie a whole lot about disease and what causes it, its ussually us. i mean in nature theres disease, its not man made , its been here forever, but we seem to be good at making it appear.

formalin, salt, peroxide, they where the weapons of choice but it was always used after you did something wrong.
eventually i sided with salt and fresh clean water and turning the stocking down and avoiding feeding until they really wanted it and were feeling better.
however it was always much less work to do things right to begin with.

that big farm also had a big shed hatchery, heaps of tanks and filters and pumps, that was such a pain tinkering with the like. hard to keep an eye on controling small volumes and large numbers of fish and still get a peaceful sleep and run ponds as well.

i like big safe water, stocked just right and fed just right, its much easier, much more natural. im so very lucky that i have that.
disease will come as expected only cause youve overpushed it..as opposed to striking you dead overnight through an electrical or pump fault.
i found once you push little tanks too hard or get a fault, it can set in real quick and take a lot to keep things healthy in there for them to get better.
big temp swings, biofilters down.. whatever.

just today i started back at the second farm as co manager again its sposed to be leading to a full lease in the next year.
I feed, breed, harvest, grade and pack, get the stocking and water q right, fix all the broken nets, pens and aerators and pumps.
all the marketing and delivery is done by the owner.

theyve got heaps of koi breeders- hundreds of them.. and thousands of goldfish. last year they only bred 1 crop of koi and if i stay long enough i plan to do a fair few more, we used to aim for four big runs from about 20 or 30 pairs a time.
its mainly feeders and cheap koi. everything gets sold cheap and no one bothers looking for good fish or really tries to breed great fish.
theres no select koi on the price list anymore. i assume they go as feeders or if they get through they get sold at 10cm. it leaves a lot of rubbish 10cm though. it works in high volumes as opposed to small volumes of perfect koi.

i like this farm cause its easy to run, is very centralised in its design and has little trouble churning a buck.

so yeah, ive seen lots of cases where chemicals are used and sometimes have been warranted.
in my mind for the pathogens ive seen, salt is very effective if you keep the water spot on after the attack, which you should do anyway. it lets the fishes natural immune system beat it. chemicals are not there to allow us to keep bad water keeping fish alive, lets face it, they cost too much.

you always seem to get a better crop when you just follow good practise in stocking and feeding rates and water changes when needed.
think that the fish has scales, slime, blood, immune system, it really needs a good environment that it evolved in to survive all this time to keep on surviving.

then i guess there are those pathogens that will win over a fish anyway.
those we can do much to exclude them even being present to begin with.
when the new fish arrives at our place.
yes sometimes by using chemicals but this way in much smaller amounts and often for shorter periods, its less drama than when it hits a big area and all the fish at once and theres no where clean to hold all the fish.

today i washed out a huge amount of old food muck out of a plastic linered pond, ive noticed with it left in there the water gets foul fairly quickly after filling. its the little measures you take along the way not only prevent disease but make for quicker growing healthy and better coloured fish.
how i see it is if you get disease its telling you that youve gone way past that happy environment that grows fish well and into the one that not only dont grow fish and keep em looking good but kills them.
really there is a often a big margin difference between perfect conditions and death.