Pete….Please help asap,& anyone else (vibriosis)

Dear Heather:

Okay, that’s a good! You’ve got the affected female isolated in your hospital tank to protect the rest of your seahorses, and you gave her a formalin bath beforehand. That’s a good start and quarantining the female was the main thing you needed to accomplish today.

The next most important thing is to treat your female with a good broad-spectrum antibiotic in conjunction with the formalin baths. Many of the medications on your list are good antiparasitics and you can just set them aside for now. This includes the Malachite Green, Metro MS (metronidazole), and General Cure. They are not needed at this time.

There are some antibiotics on your list that may be helpful for this type of infection. However, the E.M. Erythromycin is not one of them. Erythromycin is effective against gram-positive infections and the problem you’re dealing with is almost certainly due to a gram-negative bacterial infection. So avoid the EM erythromycin in this case, Heather.

Tetracycline is a good broad-spectrum antibiotic but it is only useful for treating marine fish when it is administered orally by adding it to their food. Adding tetracycline to saltwater is useless because it binds to calcium and magnesium and is deactivated. The best way to administer the tetracycline would be to bioencapsulate it in live adult brine shrimp and then to feed the medicated shrimp to your Barb, as explained below:

The best way to administer antibiotics orally is by bioencapsulating or gutloading them in live shrimp, which are then fed to the seahorses. The easiest way to gutload antibiotics is to bioencapsulate them in live adult brine shrimp (Artemia spp.), as described below. The recommended dosage of antibiotic for this varies between 100-250 mg per liter or about 400-1000 mg per gallon of water. Stay within that range and you should be all right.

If the antibiotic you are using comes in tablet form, crush it into a very fine powder (you may have to use a household blender to get it fine enough) and dissolve it in freshwater at the dosage suggested above. Soak the adult shrimp in freshwater treated with the antibiotic for 15-30 minutes and then feed the medicated shrimp to your seahorses immediately. (Don’t let your pumps and filters "eat" all the brine shrimp!)

The brine shrimp are soaked in freshwater, not saltwater, because in theory the increased osmotic pressure of the freshwater helps the antibiotic solution move into their bodies via osmosis. But in fact nobody knows for sure whether the antibiotic is diffusing into the brine shrimp or they are ingesting it in very fine particles (brine shrimp are filter feeders and will take in whatever is suspended in the water with them) or whether the brine shrimp merely become coated with the antibiotic while they are soaking in it. But that’s not important — all that really matters is that gut-loading adult brine shrimp with medications this way is effective.

Although tetracycline and oxytetracycline generally work very well when administered orally, they are all but useless when used as bath treatments for marine fish. This is because the calcium and magnesium in hard water or saltwater bind to tetracycline and oxytetracycline, rendering them inactive (Yanong, US Dept. of Agriculture). In addition, tetracycline and oxytetracycline are photosensitive drugs and will decompose when exposed to light. So these drugs are very useful for seahorses when they are administered via bioencapsulation, but they are quite ineffective when added to the water in a saltwater aquarium (Yanong, USDA). This is another reason why you must soak the live adult brine shrimp in freshwater when gutloading them with tetracycline or oxytetracycline. Since your female is barely eating at this time, it’s not going to be possible to administer the tetracycline by gutloading adult brine shrimp, so you should also avoid using the TC Tetracycline at this time, Heather. It will be completely ineffective if simply added to the saltwater in the hospital tank.

The Trisulfa and Triple Sulfa are good antibiotics but they are by far the most effective when they can be combined with a good aminoglycoside antibiotic, such as kanamycin or neomycin, neither of which you have on hand right now. Since the Trisulfa and Triple Sulfa will not be particularly useful on their own, let’s avoid them for the time being as well.

I would treat your female with the Fura MS right away, Heather. The furazolidone it contains is an effective broad-spectrum antibiotic that will work in saltwater and is one of the active ingredients in Furan2. The Fura MS is your best bet right now.

However, you have to take special precautions when administering acriflavine or nitrofuran antibiotics (such as the furazolidone in the Fura MS) because they are photosensitive and can be deactivated by light. That means you’ll need to darken the hospital tank while you treat the seahorse(s). Do not use a light on your hospital tank, perhaps cover the sides of the tank with black construction paper or something similar, and keep an opaque lid or cover on the aquarium during the treatments. Remove this cover from the aquarium only long enough to keep an eye on your seahorse and to offer her food.

The furazolidone in Furan2 (Aquarium Pharmaceuticals) can be combined safely with Acriflavine by Aquarium Pharmaceuticals, but I’m not sure if that’s also the case with the furazolidone in Fura MS and the Acriflavine MS by FishVet. I would contact the manufacturer (FishVet) of the Fura MS first thing tomorrow and ask them if they can be used together safely to treat a marine aquarium, Heather. If they give you a green light, then I would go ahead and add the Acriflavine MS to the treatment regimen as well.

Methylene blue is also included in Furan2, so you might also ask Fishvet if methylene blue can be used with Fura MS and Acriflavine MS. but unless they say specifically that it’s okay to combine those particular medications, I would avoid the methylene blue for now.

In short, Heather, go ahead and dose your hospital tank with the Fura MS (be sure not to use activated carbon filtration or chemical filtration media in the treatment tank) for now. Tomorrow, if Fishvet confirms that the medications are compatible, you could also add the Acriflavine MS, but I would not use the acriflavine unless they give you the okay.

Best of luck with the treatments, Heather! (Good work rounding up all of those medications on such short notice.)

Respectfully,
Pete Giwojna