thoughts on ick in my tank

[flanders]

Hello

I was hoping for a discussion about ick.

A few months ago I bought too many fish at a time (like 8) and one of them had ick … he had ick to the point that I could see it on him at the LFS (didn’t know what it was at the time)

To make matters worse I had a 6 degree temp drop over 24 hours in my tank.

So as you might guess the entire tank got it bad and I lost many fish as a result. I read some books and some article.

After reading the following

http://www.marineaquariumadvice.com/aqu ... ish_1.html



I decided that hyposalinity was the way to go.

I preformed the treatment at 1.0012 for 30 days with weekly 20 gallon changes. I left one blue damsel in the tank during this treatment.

After 30 days I raised the levels .. repopulated the snails, removed the blue damsel. And added a Pygmy Cherub Angel - Centropyge arg after a quarantine
It has been about 7 days since I added him and I have see 1-2 spots on him (they have since disappeared) and some on his fins.

So assuming this is ick.. what are my next steps.. I don’t want to tear down the system or do another 1-2 month round of hyposalinity. But I don’t want this to be a problem a year from now. And as tangs are a big part of my plans for this tank I was hoping for your thoughts ..


thanks

 

[Kevin1000]

My 02

Not sure I correctly followed your hypo procedure.

In general when you perform hyposalinity your goal is to lower the salinity level down to 12-14% ... depending on the tank temperature this equates to an SG of approximately 1.009. You indicate that you dropped the SG to 1.0012 which is somewhat confusing ... if you meant 1.012 then your SG was too high and it is likely that your hypo treatment was ineffective.

Heres a good article on how to perform hyposalinity

http://www.petsforum.com/personal/trevo ... inity.html

If you want an ich free tank then I suggest you setup a QT and treat all the fish (whether they show signs of ich or not) with hypo as described in the above link. Use of a refractometer is highly recommended. Leave your show tank without fish for a period of 5-6 weeks - since ich need a fish to continue there life cycle any ich within the show tank will die off.

Heres a link discussing ich ... note the illustration which described the ich life cycle.

http://www.petsforum.com/personal/trevo ... neich.html

Hope this helps.

 

[dave_atl]

I've had great success feeding the fish a garlic based food and running UV, less stressfull to the fish then other meds and procedures.