Flatworm infestation

[Moldoc]

I apologize if this has been covered here before. I tried searching without any success. I am a complete reef newbie and recently purchased an established tank off of craigslist. The move went fine and everything survived, but now that I am researching more, I am realizing that those little brown spots that are on my mushrooms and xenias are almost definitely flatworms. Any advice on how to remove them? I have read up on Flatworm eXit but am a little nervous about using it. Are there any alternatives? What will happen if I just leave them in there? The tank is 24 gallons with a back pak skimmer. I don't know what other pertinent information there is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[467echo]

Try looking in the Reef Gen Disc., the Emergency section is relatively newer. I found this right away
http://www.sdreefs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44568&highlight=flatworms

[Redeye]

best experiance I had was by removing fish to seperate tank, pulling all large rocks and corals, dipping in bucket of tank water and STRONG DOSE of FlatWormControl (supposedly 5x stronger than FWE), shaking, brushing as much off as possible, then dosing whole tank
Follow instructions on package, do a 20-25% Waterchange
I would repeat a week later, then maybe dose the whole tank acouple days after that, fish and all
They are easy to kill, but eggs will keep hatching for awhile

[limestro]

Here are some footnotes I lazy typing.

FlatWorm Exit:
-Pros: Easy to use and less manual labor (in comparison to just siphoning of). Suggested to run carbon when dosing, not necessary. Water changes would a must to siphon the detrius and die off (of the flatworms).
-Cons: Possibility of killing of shrimps.

Flatworm Eating Fish (i.e. Sixline or other types of Wrasses):
-Pros: Let nature do its work. No Manual labor involved.
-Cons: This is a hit or miss, so depending on your fish you just might be out of pocket money and the fish wont do JACK.

Manual Labor:
-Pros: You can guage the progress based on how many you siphon out. You can control the areas of removal since you will be siphoning off portions of the tank.
-Cons: Very time consuming and you can't slack off. Your going to need a lot of replacement water depending on how much siphoning you do.

Cheato Trick:
-Pros: Easy to do if you have lots of cheato at your disposal. No dosage required and no introduction of fish to worry about. Less work than manual labor. LMK if you are interested in trying this out and I will instruct you how this is informed.
-Cons: It could be anectdotal, I've only witnessed it with my own eyes once but some how the flatworms will gravitate towards the cheato in the tank. All those I have suggested in doing this either never persued it or never reported back its success or failures. LOL.

~Mike

[GrantMBrady]

add a sixline.

[Moldoc]

So, I was siphoning those flatworms for a while, then gave up. After a while, the population just crashed and I could only see a few of them at a time. It was suggested that this might be a great time to use the flatworm eXit, so I spent the morning hunting for any elusive flatworms and then dropped in the flatworm eXit. After the first dosing, nothing much was happening, and I remembered I had some activated carbon in a bag, so I took that out and redosed at 50%. After a bit I saw maybe 10 or so flatworms floating around in the water which I siphoned out. I'm going to wait a few hours then do a water change. So far, I can't see anymore flatworms, but I siphoned until I couldn't find any to begin with. Nothing in the tank looks sick at all except for the small brittle star looking things that are in my rock. They have started crawling out from the crevices and falling down looking stunned or dead. Hopefully they're just stunned. I'll update as things progress. Thanks for all the help guys! Hopefully this works.