Good evening, well done some scrapes and found Costia, really disappointed fish only been here a week, what’s the best course of treatment please preferably one that will not destroy the bio if possible, thank you Steve,
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Good evening, well done some scrapes and found Costia, really disappointed fish only been here a week, what’s the best course of treatment please preferably one that will not destroy the bio if possible, thank you Steve,
Sorry to hear you've found Costia, but at least you've now identified the problem.
I recently used bog standard NT Labs FMG and a single dose to the label instructions seems to have done the trick. Around 3 days for a notable improvement in behaviour. Scraped 3 koi a Week or so later and couldn't find any.
A lot of people prefer buying MG and Formalin separately from Duncans website and mixing it together.
There's other treatments some favour such as PP. I'd only use it if FMG didn't work simply due to the fact I'm familiar with FMG and feel comfortable using it. I had a small ammonia spike to 0.25 around the 5th day after administering FMG, but it went by itself within a day or 2 without any water changes.
Hi Steve,
Have you been in contact with the dealer that supplied the fish? In your circumstances that would be the no 1 course of action, depending on their response I would be guided by their advice and hopefully the offer of free medication?
All of the normal treatments for Costia will knock your filters back:( . Mainstream traditional treatments are Malachite and Formalin or Potassium Permanganate, personally I favour MF, Costia can at times be a difficult critter to get on top of. I have seen good results from with a product call ICC Product Page.
Hi RS and Dave, thanks for your replies, I will be going to the shop tomorrow to see what they have to say, probably a waste of time but worth a shot, do you know if Costia is a water born parasite or a parasite that is in the fish ie it would of come into the pond from the fish or it could of already been in 1 day old virgin water ?, its all so new just surprised to get Costia so quick and also because it seems to be a parasite that appears secondary.... we had a good look through the scope and we saw the perfect comma shaped parasite which matched many Costia video's.
My take is that it will have come with the fish. It is a critter that can seem to lie dormant until a fish is under stress or has another issue but for sure its unusual in a situation such as yours to have jumped in so speedily.
Was it there in significant numbers ? You will typically see a cloud of costia milling and tumbling around.
Hi Dave,
what we saw was lots of round spherical shapes that looked like orbs moving around it matched many shots of Costia that we viewed on line, at times nothing moved and then a large collection would move or single ones would move, it was quite difficult to view as they are so small, we then saw a comma shaped cell go right across our view, we both took a turn and both confirmed what we saw, the only comma shaped parasite that matched exactly was Costia it even squirmed the same as it moved with a black kicking pulsating tail is the only way I can explain..... I would not say there was significant numbers on our first scrape we saw nothing, second and third we saw this.
If you haven’t already I’d say give Duncan’s icc a try 1st to be honest. I recently had to treat for this myself and I bought an mg&f pre-mix called formalachite and it didn’t fix my issues I had to swap to another product to fix my problem.
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As I say my outbreak didn’t want to completely go with mg&f premix, and that was two full passes as well, including making as sure as possible that everything was as clean as possible with no muck sat anywhere!
Just another thought, but I’m also sure I’ve seen a video of someone saying heat ramping can get rid of costia too!?, think it was quite a high temp, but sure I’ve seen it recently! Might be worth looking into if you’re heated!
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Quick update - the outlet where I purchased the 5 koi from have provided a bottle of treatment FOC which I was not expecting so that helps a bit..... I will do treatment tomorrow as thunderstorms due tonight, Steve.
Certainly sound like costia, good you were able to spot it quickly and take action.
Whilst FMG has worked on costia in my pond in the past, the problem quickly came back so I tend to now use ICC with salt as Duncan G recommends. I last treated for it around 2 years ago and has not been back since, so certainly seems to be a good product.
The stress of transport, new pond and new water does often make fish vulnerable to an outbreak, but yours was a bit too quick to be that. Hopefully now the dealer is aware of the issue they can treat the rest of that batch of fish.
Hi Feline,
thanks for your feedback, I am treating with NT as supplied by the outlet I purchased the fish from, they are adamant that they quarantine / heat ramp / gill scrape etc before they allow there fish to be sold to the public, trouble is the fish are kept at 20/22 degree's so as you say with stress of moving etc the Costia became active, I guess others will suffer the same as I, seems to be favourable reports for the ICC product so if this does not shift it I will give that a go, many thanks Steve....
Hi Steve. Sorry to hear that you have got costia. It must be gutting so soon after getting your pond up and running. On a positive at least you have found it early enough without having too many fish in there.
Glad you got sorted with the scrapes and am sorry I wasn't able to help on this occasion.
See you soon Craig.,
Quick update on Costia, treatment has been in since Wednesday, scoped today and three scrapes showed nothing at all, will have another scrape on Tuesday but right now fingers crossed its worked, we will be watching them, with UV off and no live bacteria past few days water has turned quite cloudy green colour, water perameters are all the same except Ammonia Nh3 is shoping at 0.5mg/l for the first time other perameters are the same as day so PH and KH holding well with no fluctuations yet, i will see what the ammonia is doing tomorrow, no feed going in hoping trickle in trickle out that i turned on today will neutrillise the Nh3 by morning. Thanks Steve.