Best reef safe ick treatment?
- Thread starter Alwmh4
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Blue Seas Aquariums
BSA Staff
You can treat the fish instead of the whole tank using DR. G's Anti Parasitic Caviar medicated food.
Blue Seas Aquariums
BSA Staff
Blue Seas Aquariums
BSA Staff
No problem, There is also DR. G's Anti Bacterial caviar if you want to get them together. Helps with pop eye, fungus on the body and other bacterial infections.
mudbucket72
Active Member
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You could always qt the fish and treat there then after all looks good return to your main display
Kenyon
Community Member
Best thing you can do is build a plastic round Quarantine tank in your garage and remove all fish and treat with copper and feed garlic like crazy while you let the Ick in your display die off after completing its life cycle. I have tried everything and this is truly the only method that is worth doing especially if you have a lot invested in your tank. I used a black 30 gallon pond tank from home depot(may need to be bigger depending on how many fish) and drilled it with a pvc drain leading to a simple 10 gallon sump with a sock and nothing else. using a strong power head will create the coriolis effect keeping your fish alive much longer than a standard tank because it forces them to swim against the current and metabolize much faster. I have been almost 100 percent successful keeping fish with ick alive in this setup. Any thing you add directly to your system is just going to cause more issues killing of beneficial bacteria and damaging other livestock. Just make sure you give your system long enough before you add your fish back to the system.
Breakthecycle2
2500 Club Member
No you can't. You need to take all the fish out, treat them and keep your tank fishless for 72 days.
mudbucket72
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That's pretty much what I said with out the time frame
booth2010
Newb but eager to learn!
"Life Cycle - Ich is most often introduced into an aquarium by a fish carrying trophonts. However, cross contamination from theronts or a tomont brought in on a coral/invert are other possibilities. Assuming we are dealing with a fish carrying trophonts, this is how the life cycle plays out:
1. A trophont will typically spend 3-7 days feeding on a fish, before dropping off to become a protomont.
2. The protomont crawls around for 2-18 hours, looking for a surface to encyst upon. Once it finds this, it sticks to the surface, and begins the encysting process. The parasite is now called a tomont.
3. It takes about 8-12 hours for the cyst to harden around the tomont. After this, the tomont goes into “reproductive mode” producing numerous daughter tomites. These tomites are then released into the water column as theronts. How long it takes for theronts to be released varies greatly, depending upon which strain of ich you are dealing with. The average time is 7-14 days; however in at least one study (Colorni and Burgess 1997), it took 72 days for all the theronts to be released from a group of tomonts.
4. The now “free swimming” theronts seek out fish to feed on, thereby becoming trophonts, and the cycle starts all over again. A given strain will die out after 100 generations or so. Given the average life cycle of ich is 2 weeks, this could take almost 4 years (on average).
As you may have noticed, the timing for each stage to “move forward” to the next varies considerably. Therefore, ich is rarely in sync. For example, it is not unusual for a fish to be battling trophonts, while simultaneously theronts are swimming around looking for a host to feed on. This is especially true if your tank is plagued by more than one strain of ich. It’s this “perfect storm” that sometimes allows ich to overwhelm an immune system and the fish dies."
den75
Active Member
You can treat the fish in a QT tank and depending on the method used cure the fish in 2-4 weeks. The DT must remain without fish for 72 days(since you can't treat the DT) so the ich in the DT can run through its life cycle and be eliminated there as well.
Alwmh4
Active Member
Oh yay. Tank death. Spot are less on patient zero but now the clown has one spot. I'm feeding well. Little bits, often so to try to keep them healthy. Patient zero is stressed from his bath and hasn't eaten. The more I move him, the more stressed he will get. Not good situation
Breakthecycle2
2500 Club Member
Nope. 72 days. I'm on my 42nd day today.
Breakthecycle2
2500 Club Member
The spots are gone because the parasite has fallen off into the sand bed and is reproducing.
booth2010
Newb but eager to learn!
I hate to do this to you guys but I just mentioned something to Humblefish and he is now editing his posts about the 72 day fallow period and extending the fallow period by 4 days to a total of 76 days.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/the-dos-and-don’ts-of-quarantine.203898/page-4#post-2470045
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