Stock salt-straight NaCl, obtained from most farm supply stores.
Mix this in a 5 gal bucket of pond water until complete saturation is obtained. Water turns grey in color. Place fish into solution and usually within 1 minute they will float belly up. When they do, move them into another 5 gal bucket of straight pond water. Within a minute or 2 they will be back to normal at which point you can move them back to pond.
Several minutes in the solution won't kill them but each species is different in amount of time they will tolerate. I've left SMB in the solution during net samples and forgot about them for 4-5 minutes and never have lost any. This works on all scaled fish that I'm aware of but it will smoke a catfish in seconds.
I use (and recommend) neoprene gloves when handling the fish and I wet my gloves in the salt solution if touching the fish.
Augie came and picked up some YP from me earlier this fall and as I was measuring and weighing, I'd chuck them in the salt bath and Augie would pull them out after the floated belly up and put them in the straight water bucket. Within minutes they were ready to go into tank.
It's a very effective way of cleaning up parasites and/or prepping for movement. I also would highly recommend this for any transferred fish that may get bucket stocked-before stocking into pond of course, as it will pop every egg/spore of an external parasite literally breaking the cycle of those parasites, including flukes and it's the only external treatment I've found that will eliminate any fungus.
I'm sure there are formulas for entire pond treatment but that's going to remove many organisms that are desirable.
Last edited by Snipe; 11/14/19 01:59 PM.
