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Dewormer and Daphnia

3K views 7 replies 4 participants last post by  en7jos 
#1 ·
Hello all,

I've been reading through the forums for about a year and haven't found a definitive answer for this. I have a dirted 5g shrimp tank with a Planaria problem and I'm thinking about dosing with Fenbendazole to help keep my shrimp and MTS alive (I've already lost a yellow rabbit snail). I rarely feed the tank because I only have around a dozen juvenile shrimp (I suspect the adults either died from natural causes or Planaria), some mts and bladder snails, and a colony of Simocephalus vetulus (clinging Daphnia) that I use to supplement my feeding for my primary hi-tech 20L.

Does anyone know if Fenbendazole is lethal for Daphnia? I figured since they are crustaceans it might not be, but they have such a small biomass I feel like it could very well harm or kill them. The only scholarly article I've found so far is Mixture toxicity of flubendazole and fenbendazole to Daphnia magna (Alan Puckowski et al., 2017), where they found that both "FLU and FEN have been found to have a strong impact on an environmentally important non-target organism - Daphnia magna".

To me "strong impact" means high death rate, but does anyone have any first-hand experience with this that could shed some more light on the situation?
 
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#2 ·
Don't have any first hand knowledge or accounts to speak of... but before dosing the tank, are you absolutely sure that you have planaria????


Just want to confirm as many people mistake rhabdocoela flatworms for planaria and dose their tanks unnecessarily. If you use Fenbendazole, you may not be able to keep any fancy snails in that tank for 6-8+ months as well. (MTS would *probably* be fine?)
 
#4 ·
Sorry, have no experience with Fenbendazole as it's a restricted drug here in Singapore so just couldn't get hold of any despite my best efforts. But I did manage to get the "No Planaria" betel nut extract stuff and can thoroughly recommend this as an alternative if you are worried about your micro-fauna and snails. I was treating hydra (not planaria thankfully) and the "No Planaria" was just fine on my shrimp (RCS + CRS), snails (MTS) and the micro-fauna (cyclops, seed shrimp and a few detritus worms) in my tanks. See this thread for full details.

I know that doesn't answer your questions with regards to Fen. but is maybe an alternative approach to consider?

Regards, James
 
#6 ·
EC50 of fenbendazole to Daphnia over 48h is 0.008mg/l.
Over 21 days it is 0.0015mg/l.

EC50 means the environmental concentration at which 50% of the Daphnia are expected to die.
Sounds legit.

Based on that I think I'll try En7jos's suggestion of No Planaria and try to siphon most of my Daphnia in to a separate container before I dose and add them back in after doing a few water changes.
 
#7 ·
Just wanted to update my post; I finally got around to dosing my shrimp/Daphnia tank (I had to buy a new digital scale that goes to 0.001g to measure the dosing accurately). I'm happy to report that the No Planaria took care of my problem and there was no notable die-off of my Daphnia culture, shrimp, or snails.

Thanks for the info and suggestions!
 
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