I've had ich in my reef for at least 4 years that I know of. I know it's there because I had a breakout at least four years ago. I never qtd my fish because the first time I did that it just added to their stress and killed them all. Spent an hour moving live rock around and knocking down corals trying to get to all the fish losing a couple corals in the process. So now I just live with it knowing if they get stressed out or I don't give them the necessary nutrients to battle the parasite they'll be vulnerable. I'm good with it and they're thriving.
Why there is not really a cure for ich?
- Thread starter juanmanuelsanchez
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mike werner
2500 Club Member
sorry but i have never seen any scientific proof that garlic helps cure ich.it does go well with butter on bread.
Koi Obsession
Active Member
The only cure for Ich is copper for 10 days. the life cycle is 6 weeks . you can`t treat copper in a reef tank. You must catch all your fish quarantine them in copper for at least 10 days them mark the calendar and in 6 weeks put them back and all should be fine. You can run a UV light that will kill the live swimming parasites but the ones in the sand will rear there heads and start to feed again. If there is nothing for them to eat then the parasite will die without a host. You always have Ich in your system its just weather its dormant or active...
4FordFamily
Tang, Angel, and Wrasse Nerd!
This is the exception and not the rule. For everyone that can keep a PBT in “ich management tanks” there are 100+ more that fail.
QT your fish, observe for parasites, treat accordingly. Before I had a QT tank, I had an outbreak of velvet in my tank. Had to run out and get everything to set up QT and wait on meds to get in and do FW dips in the mean time. Only lost one very small fish.
The cure for marine parasites such as cryptocaryon and amyloodinium is a QT tank and copper. Simple as that. It's not that hard guys, just go set one up already. It will save you a lot of headache later.
The cure for marine parasites such as cryptocaryon and amyloodinium is a QT tank and copper. Simple as that. It's not that hard guys, just go set one up already. It will save you a lot of headache later.
4FordFamily
Tang, Angel, and Wrasse Nerd!
It would work out better now if you followed the guidelines — I too struggled until I did everting I should have and read up. Stuff happens, but overall far less stuff happens now with healthy parasite-free fish.
4FordFamily
Tang, Angel, and Wrasse Nerd!
10-14 days works only if the fish is immediately transferred to another completely sterile tank that has shared and will not share anything from the previous tank. As a result, for most of us, 30 days is the recommendation. I just wanted to make sure the casual readers know this, too!
seamonster
Active Member
I’ve had just about enough of ice and velvet! That **** wiped out my tank not once, but twice! So I learned my lesson and now I qt everything! I went fallow for 90 days than I learned how to dose copper and prazipro... doing it now as we speak. I even qt inverts and coral before they hit my tank too. I’m not sure if the parasites can live on shrimp, crabs or coral but I feeling that they can.. i had a ich infestation out of nowhere! No new fish but I am addicted to coral just like you! [emoji106] so....I qt inverts for at least 30 days in a fish free tank.
Parasites are a very different beast to viruses and bacteria even fungi in the form of resistance or “cures”. If you looked at the world wide economic burden of major just 3 major parasitic diseases that effect world economies (malaria, verroa mites, and guinea worm). The lost labour hours, crops, lives, and prevention costs its in the $100’s of billions. For each of these there is no cure but there has been significant advances with control.
Malaria bed nets and water dunks.
Verroa drone cell management and breeding queens with higher cleaning tendencies.
Guinea worm, providing clean water. But even these that effect billions of people, control is still the only option available to us at this time. Malaria Resistance to frontline medications becomes more and more common. Verroa mite treatments are at best 60% effective yet they themselves have a chance of killing a colony.
Guinea worm, the best treatment is manually removing the worm(eww).
Malaria bed nets and water dunks.
Verroa drone cell management and breeding queens with higher cleaning tendencies.
Guinea worm, providing clean water. But even these that effect billions of people, control is still the only option available to us at this time. Malaria Resistance to frontline medications becomes more and more common. Verroa mite treatments are at best 60% effective yet they themselves have a chance of killing a colony.
Guinea worm, the best treatment is manually removing the worm(eww).
sfin52
So many pedestrians so little time
I’m in thes pest control business. I’m not in the elimination business but control. I do and treat in a way that will hopefully stop the bugs from coming in. I can eliminate the pest. It’s the same with our tanks.
mike werner
2500 Club Member
an ounce is worth a pound now isn't it
Acorral
Active Member
Vaccine? vaccines work on a basis that your body can fight something, in the case of a parasite there is no way to vaccinate, fish fight ich in the wild by swimming, not by using their inmune system, like you fighting a tick, your inmune system is not aware at all that you have a tick and can not do anything about it.
Ingested medication? how would you control the dosage? first to determine the dosage it depends on weight/size... then how would you control the quantity the fish eats? that is exactly the problem with metronidazole, there is no way of controlling a certain concentration of the medicine in the fish blood stream for a certain period of time...
Snake oil sells and are not treated as fraud because people doesn't understand all this... and because people don't want to do the proper treatment which is quarantine, or copper, or ttm, or hypo...
Nobody profits from this... if certain amount of fish dies on the hands of hobbyists, so do many fish die in the hands of wholesalers, LFS, etc...
seamonster
Active Member
Yup!! So true!
alanbetiger
Active Member
Like others have said your issue isn’t really that there is no effective cure for Ich, It’s that there so no super effective cure in a complex environment like a reef tank. The diversity we all strive for is our Achilles heel. It’s very difficult to only kill one organism and leave the rest of the ecosystem alone.
Also there’s not a huge demand from our hobby. To put in the research and trails is very expensive. Veterinary drugs are usually $1mil+ just to go through the FDA. So any company wanting to provide this product would want to make waaaaaay more than that in sells. Even if everyone on REEF2REEF pledged $500 for the cause we wouldn’t be enough to make it cost feasible. Now if it was a huge problem for the fisheries world where Ich was costing people’s livelihood or take a food source away from the world you’d have a different scenario.
Also there’s not a huge demand from our hobby. To put in the research and trails is very expensive. Veterinary drugs are usually $1mil+ just to go through the FDA. So any company wanting to provide this product would want to make waaaaaay more than that in sells. Even if everyone on REEF2REEF pledged $500 for the cause we wouldn’t be enough to make it cost feasible. Now if it was a huge problem for the fisheries world where Ich was costing people’s livelihood or take a food source away from the world you’d have a different scenario.
This is pretty much what you can do on any aquarium as far as ICH goes. The higher the temperature the faster the ICH life cycle.
This is a temp based treatment for freshwater and works amazingly well with no loss of life. It includes some decent explanations as to why. I'm not sure what temperatures marine tanks can really handle so I'm not sure of its applicability. Esp. since I QT everything now in a bucket transfer setup and haven't had any ich related problems.
http://www.aquahobby.com/articles/e_ich2.php
I read where turning the heat up to 80 degrees speeds up the life cycle of ich but doesn't prevent it. That said, I too overfed my fish for many days, cleaned the sand bed every few days and the two fish that had a few spots lost the spots and so far, none have returned. I also feed them garlic soaked shrimp and soaked seaweed. It did seem to work when I noticed the start of ich in the tank. I too am afraid to add new fish now. There are a few fish stores that QT fish before they sell them. One is Triton Marine in Ohio and another is in Pompano Beach, Fl, where I bought a tang that came home and was very healthy. If I buy more fish in the future, it will be from one of those two stores.
So you do the tank transfer method in buckets instead of in tanks?? I guess you put an air stone in the buckets?? I've heard of tank transfer method but not this so it's just crazy that's all but I guess that it would work other then some fish would be to big to put in a bucket
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