can i use potassium permanganate in my reef tank?

[stickyhops]

simple question........ can i use potassium permanganate in my reef tank to eliminate flukes?
will it cause damage to inverts and rock?

[birddog486]

Not a good Idea, You need a dosage of 2-4ppm, keeping ORP at 500mv range for 4-8 hrs to kill flukes and that will kill all the benificial bacteria in your system.

If you need to dose the reef your better off using Praziquantel. You may want to treat once a week for 4 weeks but it's easy on the bio bugs you need.

Travis

[birddog486]

You should also know it only takes 1.5 GRAMS per 100 GALLONS to reach a strength of 4ppm.

Travis

[sl-atl]

I don't think I would... The below quote is from Reefkeeping magazine (http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-09/eb/index.php):

A local aquarist found his colonies of Montipora to be colonized by pest aeolid nudibranchs... . He decided to isolate Montipora colonies in one tank and then use a volumetric approximation of the 50mg/l dose for a 40-gallon aquarium with sand, corals, fish and other snails present. During the course of treatment, he removed two fish that appeared to be in distress. The removal of the fish caused a small amount of the treated water to be displaced and move into an overflow and into another tank below it (accidental treatment) containing other species of fish and coral. Even this small amount of treated water had surprising effects within a period of about 10 hours at the low concentration of the accidental treatment tank. He reported that all the fish died rapidly. Xenia and Anthelia “melted” and died rapidly. Pocillopora damicornis and Seriatopora hystrix sloughed their tissue. In both the treatment and accidental treatment tanks, errant polychaetes died, but small “feather worm” polychaetes survived. Stomatella snails, a largely unprotected species, survived. Larger and smaller species of Trochus survived, although the larger species were clearly stressed when initially exposed in the treatment tank. Perhaps their operculums effectively kept out the KMnO4 treated water. A Sarcophyton were clearly stressed, but Sinularia were apparently unaffected. All zoanthids, Aiptasia and Psammacora were unaffected. Turbinaria reacted acutely to the first exposure, but then recovered fully as though unaffected. All pest aeolid nudibranchs had disintegrated and all egg masses had vanished.

I know this is anecodtal, but it would make me extremely nervous about using this stuff in a display at any concentration...