Right, so I decided to go ahead with throwing some weird stuff into the pond.
2 weeks ago, one of my fish didn't really look "show quality" anymore. Scales standing up slightly around the dorsal fin, a few sores, white turning purple, not good. Still happily swimming, no sign of stress, but sick nonetheless.
We fortunately have a vet in Belgium that does house calls anywhere in the country. Net fish, scrape, look under microscope ... Trichodina. Some other fish had traces as well, but nothing worrying.
Antibiotics were injected, and the infected area was cleaned with a special gel - back in the water he goes.
I asked the vet about a treatment I had been reading about for ages, a.k.a "bombing the pond", a.k.a potassium permanganate, and he agreed that it would definitely help against Trichodina.
Now this stuff is pretty dangerous in less capable hands (like, erm, mine ;), the full story and the Ultimate FAQ can be found at Roark's Experimental Puddle. That FAQ did a fine job scaring the hell out of me (rightfully so I might add), so I decided to first search for all additional information I could find from Roark and Dr. Roddy Conrad regarding PP. A good place for additional information is Cyberfins.
It would take serious preparation, as a few things are key:
. pond aeration and circulation
. not killing yourself whilst preparing the magic potion (d'uh)
. not killing your whole pond because of a miscalculation
. not killing the filter bacteria
I decided to stay away from it until it was really needed to treat the pond, having never used PP before.
A few weeks later, a fish jumps out of the pond and lands almost in my lap. Hmmm, not good, looks like he's got it as well. Right, that's it then, I'm gonna "Nuke the pond".
I first calculated (on my PC) the dosage needed for my 4600 US gallon/18.000 liter pond. A 2ppm (a rather safe dosage for a beginner) would need 35 grams of the stuff. Calculated again. Asked the guys at Nishikigoi Online to double check this dosage. Right, that seemed OK. I also calculated the "antidote" in case things went horribly wrong, and found that I would need 44 grams of sodium thiosulfate to instantly stop the PP treatment.
Armed with this I went to the local pharmacy, and asked them to prepare me 4 doses of PP and 4 doses of sodium thosulfate, as well as 3 liters of 3% hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), the latter being used to clean up the mess PP leaves behind.
I also went out to buy some bits of pipe so that I could still use my mechanical prefilter, bypass my biofilter, and go to the stream/waterfall (as I wanted to treat that bit as well. I use the Answer as a prefilter, and checked with the manufacturer if it was safe to keep it into the system whilst doing a 2ppm PP treatment. Got a reply the same day: It was.
I already had installed a spraybar a few weeks before, but added a few airstones to the Hi Blow 80 just to be sure my sturgeon wouldn't suffocate (PP uses up a *lot* of oxygen). I was lucky the temps had gone down after the hottest summer we ever saw, water temp was 20°C.
I also found me a safety mask and a dust mask to that I wouldn't kill myself whilst making the purple tea. Cleaned out the mechanical filter completely so the PP wouldn't just attack all the crud but actually would work on the fish. Installed the bypass for the biofilter:
Notice the giggly DIY trickle tower ;-) I then put a small pump in the biofilter to circulate the water for the duration of the treatment and kept the airstones going - you don't want a dead biofilter after a PP treatment.
This is where the pipe went into the stream.
As a last precaution, I printed out the aforementioned FAQ in case something would go horribly wrong. That is not like saying "this is dangerous, keep away", but people a lot smarter than me have killed their whole pond by making a small mistake. So I was quite nervous (you should be really), my wife fled the house as I'm a real knob when I'm like that... (only then ? I hear her think...) So I don't have a picture of me looking like Darth Vader whilst preparing the PP, phew :-) Trust me when I say I looked like a complete lunatic.
Time to make a suspension, I first got me some very hot water in a plastic garden variety watering can, carefully added the PP (gloves! check ! masks ! check!), then filled up with more water and stirred with a wooden spoon.
I then started to add this gently to the pond in different places where there is much circulation. You don't want a fish to accidentally swim into a 200 ppm solution, and my fish are way too tame to just scare them away. They'd think "hey, nice purple food"...
Whilst pouring it in, I realized that PP is probably totally useless for treatment of sick fish, but people are just addicted to the incredibly nice bright purple/pink color. ;-)
Added some to the vortex:
I immediately understood that this view would be my friend in monitoring the color of the water. When you first treat a pond with PP, it may attack a lot of DOC (dissolved organic compounds) and turn brown/yellow quite quickly. So you have to monitor the color very closely to see when it happens, and if you need to redose or not.
This is how it looks in the pond:
As you see, the fish all turned red (they don't of course, it just looks that way), and you can see the purple/pink shine under the deck (which is the fish bedroom BTW), but it's not so easy after a while to see if there is still any pink left.
The fish didn't seem bothered and were playing with the extra airstone I had put in just before. They did however start to swim "deeper" - normally most fish are with their heads out of the water when someone's near the pond.
Arty farty close up of the water:
As you can see, this was 30 minutes after I had added the PP, and your mind can play tricks about what color the water actually looks like. My advice is to keep walking around the pond to watch the water in different angles, and use the "white cups" trick on Roark's website. I was kinda hoping the water would stay pink with the one dose, but alas, that was not to be, I quickly saw the pink turning yellow. After 90 minutes, it looked like this:
There was some brown foam, very little, certainly not the "bug soup" you would expect, fish regained their normal color, time for another Darth Vader imitation. I didn't feel comfortable, as 2ppm is a safe dose, but 4 ppm is considered a pretty hot dose, too hot for beginners. So I didn't want to add the 2nd dose too soon, but also was determined to keep the treatment going for at least 6 hours. I waited another 15 minutes (better safe than sorry) and decided to go ahead.
I prepared & slowly added the 2nd dose, whilst carefully looking at the fish. Sure, they notice "something" is happening, but again they didn't seem stressed. The water looked like this:
As you can see, a lot more purple/pink than after adding the 1st dose. Fish still OK after 2 hours, but even if the advice is normally "go and watch the pond every 15 minutes" I decided to go an extra mile and stay with the fish. I'm glad I did, as after 3 hours, a golden orfe suddenly jumped out of the water, over the plants, onto the gravel :eek: Sorry, no pics, as I wanted to get him back asap. He only stayed out 10 seconds or so, and he was fine afterwards. Mental note: during yearly redesign of the pond, make the pond wall a bit steeper so they can't as easily "escape".
As an aside story: when the fish jumped - which caused this treatment to go ahead -, I noticed something very weird. All the fish were happily swimming when this happened, doing their stuff, finding bugs, asking for food. When I threw the fish back into the water, they still continued doing so, they hardly noticed.
Then suddenly, 30 seconds later (nothing had happened in the mean time), they started swimming a bit deeper. Another 60 seconds, and they swam nervously under the deck/at the bottom. 3 fish started to swim alongside the jumper following him around. Another minute later other fish started to follow these 3 fish. It took half an hour before things went back to normal and they came out to greet me again.
My home made theory is that a stressed fish can somehow release a hormone into the water that notifies the other fish, causing a chain reaction.
Anyhoo, back to the treatment. the water clearly decided that pink suited it fine, and after 3,5 hours it looked like this:
My wife had returned home by then, asking if I killed all the fish yet ;-) (just joking, she spends quite a lot of time playing with the fish, stroking them etc. where as she first thought them to be utterly stupid animals).
Things were quite un-eventful after that, and I decided I had earned my "whisky at the pond" moment (there's quite a lot of those moments actually :blush:)
After 5 hours:
You can clearly see "brown", but when you look closely at the nearest fish, it looks orange. Well, it isn't, it's a silver/blue doitsu koi. This means the PP was still active, and there was no need for a 3rd dose, as my aim was to sustain the treatment for 6 hours this first time.
My cat Romeo was less than impressed with all my chemical wizardry:
That hurt my feelings, so I decided to treat him with PP as well. It worked, and he looked like this after a while:
;-)
Just kidding ! Keep this stuff away from your fin-less pets ! I have 4 of these critters (Rusty is a Maine Coon) and they love being near the pond. Funny though: they are actually scared of the fish, but they will & do eat the "jumpers".
After 6 hours, the pond looked like this:
This is where I called it a day and decided to stop the treatment with H202. I didn't use the sodium thiosulfate, as I want to do another treatment tomorrow or the day after, and you don't want it to mess up the "color" changes. I dropped in 560 ml of H2O2, and almost instantly the pond went clear again. It took another hour to get back to the clearness it had before the treatment. Some people report their water being even clearer after a treatment, but my guess is that the Answer is doing a pretty fine job of removing floating debris etc (100 micron screen), so as expensive as it is, it beats cleaning 60 brushes every Sunday morning ! Just open the drain for a few seconds every day, job done.
I then took the time to undo the temporary plumbing, and connected my biofilter after about an hour. Fish came back up for eating, but I didn't feed them just yet, in case I would suffer a nitrite spike. But water tested just fine this morning.
Right, that's it. The above information is not meant as a "this is how it's done", but rather meant for providing pictures as how it may look like. For the full whack, please read the FAQ before even thinking about doing it yourself.
Happy ponding.
Edit next day:
The pond now does indeed look even clearer ! Almost spooky actually, they indeed now seem to "float" in mid air, really weird. The picture didn't really work out due to polarization, but it gives you an idea.
