CRAP! Fish caught Ich =/

Cozen89

Premium Member
Just got home from watching fireworks and see white spots all over 4 out of my 5 fish. Sucks. At least I have my new tank set up so I can move all my corals to the new tank and use my old one to treat them with medication.

What medication does everyone recommend for Ich and should I take all my live rock out too before I dose the medication?

This sucks, not sure how they could have caught this. All I did was remove some of the rocks to my new tank and do a water change. Must've stressed them out or something.

Any advice?
 
Yes take the live rock out do not dose medicine with rocks in there. It could absorb the medication and screw things up and remove the sand as well. Use seachem cuprimine or hyposalinity treatment. Cuprimine is less toxic to the fish compared to other copper medications, but remember copper medication is like humans going through kemo and hypo is less stressful and very affective as well. Treat them for two weeks and watch them. Leave your ST alone for 6 weeks fallow. Watch the fish while they are being medicated and after you are sure all the ich is gone then you can move the fish over to the ST.
 
Ok, so take all my LR and all my coral out and move to my new tank. Then do hyposalinity to treat the ich? I have 6 fish in there, will having no where to hide really stress them out?

Also can you explain what the hyposalinity treatment is exactly?
 
Thanks for the link. It says hypo takes about 6 weeks. Does medication work faster than this? I was hoing to tear down my old tank and sell off most of the parts. Will my old equipment be compromised by using medication? Such as skimmer/powerheads.

Also if I move my corals, LR to my new tank, is there a risk of bringing some ich to my new tank? I have a fish in there already that I don't want to get sick.

How about my old tank water? If I transfer some of my old tank water to my new tank will that have any negative affects? I was hoping to move half of the old tanks water to the new tank to help in the transfer adjustment and cycling.

Sorry for all the quesitons, just a bit stressed out by this.
 
Should my 2 fish that aren't showing any dots be moved out right away so they don't have to go through the whole medication process, or is it already too late for them as well?
 
No problem, dont use your good eq on the tank once you use medication its going to be stuck in that stuff. Just go to 6th ave or something get one of thoes odysea filters for like 9 dollars or so and let it run with a cheap power heard. When you move your rocks to the new tank there wont be ich. But ich is still in the water you transfered to the tank, if you want ich out of your system you have to wait a month in order for them to die, if not it will still be there. So make sure there is no fish in there or else ich wont die. Ich needs a host to live and reproduce. Medication would be faster, cuprimine requires 2 doses a 2 week period but it wouldnt matter, since the water that you threw in to the new ST would still have ich, so in the end you have to wait 6 weeks, fallow. For the extra fish find another tank and let it sit in there for 6 weeks, you might not know it might have gotten ich already, since ich travels in the water and goes through cycles. heres another link that tells you how ich lives,
http://www.petsforum.com/personal/trevor-jones/marineich.html
If you would like more in depth information on how to treat your fish I would reccomend pming kevin2000, hes like the guru for this stuff, I hope this helps.
 
Oh mix up a batch of vitamin enriched food + garlic guard or garlic extreme so that the fishes can build up their immune system to fight off ich.
 
yeah I was planning on the garlic as soon as I get up tomorrow. So I probably transferred ich to my new tank if I dumped some of that old water into my new tank this afternoon. Great. Guess I'll have to catch that new fish out and put him in the old tank to get treated. Maybe I'll watch him for a day or 2 to see if he has any spots.

Just moved all my coral and half my rock out of the old tank. Waiting to move the rest tomorrow because I don't want to completely stress out the fish and give them no where to hide. Altho that is probably already too late. I do have a cheapo odyssea powerhead I can put in my old tank for circulation. I'll take out my hydors before I do the medication.
 
Cozen, be very cautious in moving anything from your old tank to your new tank. The life cycle of these parasites is such that the white spots you see on the fish are cysts which release "spores" that settle down onto the rocks / gravel / equipment where they mature and then release the microscopic critters that swim around and try to find a host (where they burrow into the skin and create new "white spots"). This is greatly simplifying the process, but speaks to the general cycle without getting into terminology like trophonts, etc. If you were to put the infected fish in a bare quarantine tank after giving them a full freshwater dip (3-5 min, depending upon the species), you'd likely see then next morning what appeared to be sugar on the bottom of the tank. These would be the cysts that dropped off the fish due to the freshwater bath.

It's really hard to get ood or crypt out of a tank once it is established at epidemic proportions, and some will say that the parasites are always present (much like cold germs are all around us, even if we don't have the symptoms of sneezing or runny noses). I've had good luck in the past by taking out all the fish and quarantining them in copper, with FW baths as needed if spots appear. If you do go the FW bath route, be sure to siphon the bottom of the quarantine tank daily to remove any cysts (and be sure to keep all your quarantine materials separate from the rest of your gear ... the cysts are sticky and you can easily reinfect your good system). Once all your fish are out of the tank, leave it completely free of fish (shrimp / crabs / inverts are OK) for 6-8 weeks. I actually left my tank fallow for 3 months just to be sure. If all looks good after the 6-8 week period and your fish have been clean for at least 3-4 weeks, you can re-introduce them into the tank and hopefully they'll be OK.

A couple other thoughts ... good to remove your equipment before medicating as the meds will soak into the plastic to some degree. Supposedly you'll be OK with the equipment if you give it a hot freshwater bath and then let it dry out. Garlic also works well in some cases as a preventative ... it is believed by some that the garlic permeates the skin of the fish (much like you might smell like garlic when sweating if you've recently eaten a meal with a lot of garlic), and this prevents the parasite from attaching to the fish when it is looking for a host.

Hope the above is helpful ... just one more perspective on what might help. These parasites are a pain, and only time and patience will help get your tank back on track.
 
Thanks for the insight. This Ich breakout had like the worse and best timing ever. I've been putting together my new tank and was going to transfer everything over tomorrow finally after a long wait. I guess on the bright side it's good the breakout occurred before going to my new tank. I just hope I didn't bring it to my new tank, that would get me ****ed.

As for quarantine tanks, what is really needed for them in terms of filtration etc? Just a powerhead or so for circulation? And do weekly water changes?
 
by the way, Ich seems to be way too common a problem. So it seems. this is my first case ever. But I notice a lot of other people have this issue. What is a good way to prevent this from happening? UV? Feed garlic regularly? I can already tell that I don't ever want to go through this again.
 
I used to feed my fish with food soaked in Garlic extract ( Garlic Extreme, Selcon, Vita-C and other vitamins ) during bouts with ICH in my reeftank... NEVER medicated and seems to have always worked... mostly for fish that recently just got ICH but for fish that have it already for a long time I really dont know if it would work and depending on how weak they already are....
 
I've used garlic soaked food as well in the past to keep it in check. If there were only a couple spots here and there, it would get beaten down pretty easily. The problem occurs when the fish are stressed and their resistance diminishes. My big problem occurred with fish I'd had in the tank for 5+ years in some cases, but when I did an overhaul of the tank to move some rock and cleanup the tank they got it bad. Prior to that, no problems whatsoever and no meds were ever used.

For my quarantine I keep a bare tank with a couple small pots or pieces of PVC depending upon the type of fish that is being quarantined. The only filtration is a suspended media filter; water changes are made if the quality of the water deteriorates too much.
 
Yeah I'm trying to avoid medication if possible. I woke up today and a lot of their spots went away. I ran over to the fish store and bought some garlic and did a feeding. Might do another small feeding with garlic tonight. Hopefully I caught this before it got out of hand. I think the fish got stressed when I started moving some rock and coral to my new tank.

How often do you feed with garlic when there are no signs of ich? Just as an overall benefit to the fish.
 
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you can feed anytime you want it doesnt matter. I feed mine on a daily basis+ there are some fish foods that come with garlic additives. Also add selcon and other vitamin additives to help them out.
 
Garlic is awsome to help the fishes, like the above you can feed as much as you want. A UV light would help but not much, since ich lives in the water colum, it kind of hard to get enough water through the uv in order to kill them off. So how are things now?
 
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still a few small spots. When I woke up today most of it was gone. Fed garlic twice today. I'd say 2 fish have maybe 4 spots each left.
 

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