400gal in wall ich tank

[BryanW]

3 month old tank. Bought about 10 frags that have taken off and are doing great, montis, acro, rose anenome. Now comes the fun part. I got a bit lazy(never again) and followed the advice of my lfs guy and purchased about 10 fish over 2 weeks, dropping them in with no problems. Everyone is doing great, eating, no signs of anything. Next day, bang, my hippo, and powder blue are covered with white spots.

So here's the million dollar question. I'm thingking I have two solutions.

1. Take all frags and inverts out and do a hypo treatment on displayt tank for 8 weeks. I can probably talk my lfs guy into keeping the corals for me.

2. Pull the rock out, catch all the fish, and put them in a qt tank and treat with hypo. I don't have a qt tank big enough, so this would be a bit more costly. I'm leaning towards #1...can anyone see anything wrong with #1 idea?

While on the subject, would there be any problem purchasing additional fish, and placing them in the display tank and including them in the hypo treatment. I'm thinking I could get a few more of the fish I was going to purchase anyway, therefore it would save me a bit of time qt'ing a few times in the coming months.

Any and all comments are greatly appreciated.

 

[snorvich]

3 month old tank. Bought about 10 frags that have taken off and are doing great, montis, acro, rose anenome. Now comes the fun part. I got a bit lazy(never again) and followed the advice of my lfs guy and purchased about 10 fish over 2 weeks, dropping them in with no problems. Everyone is doing great, eating, no signs of anything. Next day, bang, my hippo, and powder blue are covered with white spots.

So here's the million dollar question. I'm thingking I have two solutions.

1. Take all frags and inverts out and do a hypo treatment on displayt tank for 8 weeks. I can probably talk my lfs guy into keeping the corals for me.

2. Pull the rock out, catch all the fish, and put them in a qt tank and treat with hypo. I don't have a qt tank big enough, so this would be a bit more costly. I'm leaning towards #1...can anyone see anything wrong with #1 idea?

While on the subject, would there be any problem purchasing additional fish, and placing them in the display tank and including them in the hypo treatment. I'm thinking I could get a few more of the fish I was going to purchase anyway, therefore it would save me a bit of time qt'ing a few times in the coming months.

Any and all comments are greatly appreciated.

My condolences. Hypo is difficult to maintain, especially in large tank due to evaporation and associated ATO. Also, since the live rock will be compromised with SG 1.009, I am not sure how to maintain your biological filter for such a large number of fish for so long. I would definitely NOT purchase additional fish as this increases requirements on your biological capability . And remember that your LFS has cryptocaryon irritans in their system so you had better develop a good quarantine protocol going forward. Your only feasible solution is number two.

 

[sandwi54]

Here are my comments.

1. Hypo treatment in the display tank will kill every single organism except for the fish. It will kill everything in your live rocks and live sand. The biological filter will survive but you will likely experience a massive die-off and degraded water quality. Though, in a 400g tank the rise in ammonia/nitrite will likely be low or even undetectable by test kits.

2. I recommend catching all the fish and place them in a QT for treatment. Doing hypo in the DT is pretty costly because you're going to dumping a lot of expensive saltwater into the toilet. If your current QT is not big enough, go buy another used one on craigslist. I bought my 55g for $45. If you don't have an established bio filter for the QT, expect to do two large water changes per day for the next few weeks.

3. You will need to be more patient and slow down. This hobby requires a lot of patience to be successful. You have an existing problem that you have yet to take care of and you should not be buying any more fish. More fish means more bio load and unless you have a very well established bio-filter already, you're likely going to kill more fish from ammonia/nitrite spikes. Another issue is that the new fish may come in with other diseases that require treatments that cannot be combined with hypo. For example, cupramine that's used to kill velvet cannot be used with hypo, so if your new fish has velvet you'd be screwed big time, since you cannot raise the salinity faster than 1 week and you cannot administer cupramine until the salinity is over 1.020.

Focus on curing the fish of ich and then move onto new fish. Of course, quarantine everything from now on to prevent this again.

 

[acasp4]

I would do this. Get a few cleaner shrimp and cleaner wrasses and feed the tangs food that contains garlic. Ich I think lives in hippo tangs and you can never get rid of it but they only get the white spots when stressed and then it could spread to other fish. If you keep tairing apart your tank switching the fish back and forth from qt to show tank its just gonna keep stressing out. I would just get some shrimp and cleaner wrasses and feed them plenty of garlic and hope for the best. jmo And keep your salinity at 1.025 - 1.026

 

[snorvich]

I would do this. Get a few cleaner shrimp and cleaner wrasses and feed the tangs food that contains garlic. Ich I think lives in hippo tangs and you can never get rid of it but they only get the white spots when stressed and then it could spread to other fish. If you keep tairing apart your tank switching the fish back and forth from qt to show tank its just gonna keep stressing out. I would just get some shrimp and cleaner wrasses and feed them plenty of garlic and hope for the best. jmo And keep your salinity at 1.025 - 1.026

Sorry, I disagree with all parts of this advice. Cleaner shrimp and cleaner wrasses have NO AFFECT on cryptocaryon irritans.