About four months back I ordered five fish from aquabid. I purchased a L183 pleco, and a pair of apistogramma agassizzi and nijssenni each. I purchased from an aquabid dealer with near perfect reputation. All fish looked dead on purchase in cold to touch water. I drip acclimated into their bags with a little more haste than usual as I needed to warm the water if they were alive, and indeed they all were. The pleco died an hour or so later as L183s are very sensitive and it had had a tough ride, but I saved the other four.

I was down a fish. The owner that the seller works for also thought it would be a good idea to leave people's credit card information in a car, in a city, which of course was broken into. Instead of calling to inform me of this urgent matter, they emailed me. At midnight. Luckily I was up, and I called to cancel. Needless to say, with a dead fish and compromised debit card, I was annoyed.

Within the last couple weeks I've noticed camallanus on the nijssenis. The infestation was really bad on the visible end alone, and had clearly been brooding for a while and was the reason that had gone into semi-permanent hiding. The agassizzis are fine, but other fish in the community are starting to show it if you look closely. Given the timeline if these parasites, they must have road in on the nijssenis. What a great transaction that ordeal has been.

Nevertheless we persevere. Flubendazole has been easily available to me, so I've taken my first crack with it. I absorbed some into blood worms and fed. Some fish have shown drastic improvement, but this won't work longterm I can see already. Flubendazole must be digested. My male nijssenis is too far gone to eat very heartily and he shows no improvement due to this while the rest of the tank heals. His worms will reinfest the tank.

This moves me on to Levamisole HCl and persistent vacuuming. This is where I am now. Hopefully I'll have some here next week.

My question is not of treatment, but cross contamination. When I free frozen food, I freely dip a plastic cup into one aquarium to get a little water to thaw out the food. I then share the food between two or three tanks. I don't take up much water at all, a few ounces at most, but I do end up sharing a bit of water between the tanks.

1) Have I spread the parasites between the tanks?

2) I was thinking. Could just using a little water from the tap hurt anything? I feed frozen every night in one tank as I have a couple fish that won't accept much else, but the other tanks only get it twice a week or so. Could two or three ounces of chlorinated water really do any sort of damage in large tanks? My smallest tank that ever gets frozen (with the exception of the 5g when it has fry I suppose) is my 29g. This would prevent cross contamination for sure. A different cup for each tank would be annoying and I'd avoid that if I could. If I can't though, well then I can't.

Thanks!