second day

All fishes fine. Turns out I'm not missing any- counted ten guppies and the fourth white cloud showed up! I got the diagnosis right- have siphoned tiny red worms off the floor of Laddie's QT bin and the guppy fry tank with a pipette, and I see worms extruding from the vents of five or six guppies in the tenner. That tank and the 33L will be the hardest to clean tomorrow- I'll have to find my tiny home-made vacuum siphon to gravel vac between all the plants. Laddie still isn't eating but continues to look perky; the other fishes ate peas today.

It took me over an hour to check on and spot-clean the floor of four tanks. I only have one pipette and didn't want to use a siphon hose draw out too much water and have to replace figuring out new medication dose- I just wanted to get out the shed paralyzed worms. So in between tanks I washed my hands, rinsed the wastewater receptacle with soapy water, and poured boiling hot water over and through the pipette. I don't know if it's useful at this point to try and avoid cross-contamination between the tanks as they're all infected. But I did it anyway.

I sterilized all my siphon hoses, plastic cups, gallon fish water pitcher, clean and dirty water buckets, tweezers and aquascaping scissors after the initial water changes in hot water. Tried a method I hadn't used before- boiled water on the stove in my very largest pots and poured it all into a big cooler got it to be over 165 degrees and shut it up everything soaking for three hours. It held the heat very well- after three hours still too hot to dip my fingers in the water, I had to lift out the items with tongs. My hoses are all semi-opaque now.

For the buckets I wiped those down with diluted bleach solution and then rinsed with boiling hot water as well as I could, several times until they no longer smelled like bleach.

When I do the big water changes tomorrow, won't have time to do all the sterilizing- it's a school day with a scheduled meeting as well- so I'll probably have to set everything aside and sterilize the next morning. Hope that's okay. I'm trying to be very careful not to spread it because I've heard of camallanus worms wiping out people's entire stock. It's very contagious and very hard to get rid of, from what I've heard. Some people just euthanize all their fish, tear down the tanks, throw out stuff or sterilize, and start over. Ugh.