kathy c said they do but my ? is: After you take out all the fishes and qt them in a separte tank what happens to the ich in the display tank with the corals & inverts. will ich die out, can they survive in Live rocks and sand or do they really need a host to live.
Gotta throw in a correction here Cisco to your original question-
I did
not say that inverts carry ich, to my knowledge they do not and that is why it is not suggested that they too get moved to a QT tank when you have to treat for ich. You only need move the fish to a QT.
Regarding corals - I said that it
is possible for corals that are moved from an ich infected tank to bring the ich with them.
We've all seen the question ...."I haven't added anything (meaning fish) to my tank in X amount of time, where did I get ich from?" ..and then we sit here and suggest to the lamenting reefer that maybe their fish got stressed, or their parameters are off, or ask if there was a temp swing or 12 other things...when maybe all they did was purchase a coral that came from a system with ich in it...
I am NOT suggesting that is always the case when a new fish hasn't been introduced, but it is food for thought. We know we have to leave a tank fallow for 6-8 weeks after we take out the fish. We know ich is a parasite ..
.
?noun 1.an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.
so, no - it cannot live without a host (the fish), but we also know it doesn't die off immediately once you remove the fish (or life would be oh so much simpler!)
The ich is still in the tank for x period of time..here is a quote from ATJ's site that discusses ich..
C. irritans has a four stage life cycle, as shown in Figure 1. The parasitic stage (trophonts) is the one that results in the appearance of white spots all over the fish. The trophonts burrow under the skin where they feed on body fluids and tissue debris. When the trophonts first infect the fish they are small but grow as they feed and so the white spots are initially small but get larger as they mature. Once mature, they drop off the fish and sink/swim down to the substrate where they encyst and begin to reproduce. In this stage they are called tomonts. After a number of days in which the tomonts divide, the cyst ruptures, releasing the tomites. Tomites may differentiate into theronts, the infective stage, which actively seek a host to reinfect.
Point is, once the trophonts fall off the fish they lands somewhere in your tank..unforunately most of us have rock and sand and CORALS down there where the tomonts land.
So yes, IMO you can transfer ich from one tank to another on a coral.
Google "fish ich" and you will find 2,730,000 links (no kidding!)
I'd like to see this discussion get away from the fish themselves and what works/doesn't work and get it back to the OP's original question about ich in regard to inverts (we already know about that) but mostly about transfering ich through coral trades/sales.
I'd like to know what you folks think about that?