My poor fish are in a quarantine tank being treated for both capillaria and camellanus worms using levamisole which seems to be doing the trick for them. I am clearing their normal home now, having nuked it once more with levamisole which doesn't "do" snails or capillaria eggs and figured I might as well nuke them while I am at it. I have fenbendazole here which is supposed to be added to food. No fish in that tank so no food. Will dumping it straight into the water wipe out the pests regardless of their life cycle stage? The tank is also planted if that needs to be considered. Thanks!
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I use the Fenbendazole at 2.5 drops per gallon to treat for worms and gill flukes as opposed to 1 drop per gallon to treat for Hydra. I haven't had any fish react badly to the higher dosage level, but I've never exposed tiny fry, just juvenile and adult fish.
Be aware that the milky white substance settles out onto everything in your tank. You will end up needing to clean out all the hoses with a brush, take out hard scape and thoroughly brush and rinse it, and will need to clean the residue off of your driftwood and plant leaves as well. Magic erasers work well for cleaning plant leaves. At a dose of 1 drop per gallon the residue isn't so bad, but at dosage levels of 2.5 drops per gallon cleaning off residue is absolutely necessary.
My primary use for Fenbendazole is to prophylactically treat wild caught fish in buckets as a dip for a few hours before putting them into quarantine tanks. Then I watch the fish for a few weeks for any further signs of gill flukes or worms and only treat the quarantine tank if I'm suspicious there's a problem (irritated gills, erratic swimming, not putting on weight). If Levamisole is killing the worms in question and doesn't have the milky white residue, then I would stick with that. I've never used Levamisole so can't compare the two medications.
I use Safe Guard, a Fenbendazole based med to sold to treat goats for worms and is available from farm supply places. It is a white milk-like liquid which I use at 1 drop per gallon. I use it mainly for hydra and any unusual worm like things I find in a tank. It does not cause any harm at this level to fry, and hydra are usually in the fry tank. But it should not be use but every third day, although I have never had to dose a second time. Since there are 20 drops per mL, I use 1.5 mL to dose a 30 gallon tank.
PVAS recently had a vet talk about fish diseases and how to treat them. I was hoping she would give us a summary table of the treatments, not sure if she sent it to PVAS. But the one thing I learned that caused me to change what I do to treat fish was related to velvet (oodinium). Apparently the usual treatments for ich do not work with velvet. Velvet only responds to copper.
JoAnn, I don't believe that the Fenbendazole would affect the worm eggs any more than the Levamisole would. You would need to wait for the eggs to hatch and then dose them. You could dose the tank with Levamisole repeatedly over a period of however many days it takes the eggs to hatch. Alternatively, you could remove all the substrate and bake it at 300F for 2 hours to kill any residual eggs that escaped siphoning. Keep the plants in buckets during all of this soaking in a Levamisole solution.
Do you know if camallanus or capillaria can survive in a tank without a fish host? I know many other types of parasites like ich and oodinium cannot survive more than several hours without finding a fish host after hatching, so an effective way of ridding a tank of any residual ich or oodinium is to leave the tank fish-free for 14 days while maintaining good water conditions and high temperatures.
Good luck with this and keep us informed of what you find out. It's good to hear that your fish are on the mend.