I want to scrub my fish with a luffa sponge...

COreefer

COreefer

Premium Member
Man I picked up a pair of bicinctus clowns recently from on online retailer. Unfortunately I didn't QT them and now half my tank has been struck by cryptocarren irritans. I know it was the clowns because they had it the day after IU aded them, but healed quickly...I have had minor issues with ich in the past but for some fish this one is pretty bad. All of the fish are eating and so forth, but a couple look terrible. I ramped up the ozone and Eric loaned me his UV sterelizer...

36 hrs after hooking up the UV things are no better, but they are no worse either. Everytime I look at these fish they make me ich. I just want to scrub the ich spots off of them. I know there isn't much I can do but keep up the water parameters, use garlic, UV, and ozone, and pray they pull through it.

Anyone have any positive stories to hang my hat on???
 
Sorry Eric, but I don't have any great stories on ick. However, I wouldn't recommend scrubbing them down haha. I have had some success with a hippo tang that was almost dead, and a blue velvet damsel,using a fresh water dip. They both recovered, and seemed to develop a better immunity to it.
 
Sorry to hear that Eric, but I've had good luck with ich just using cleaner shrimp and garlic. Just keep it up and let it run it's course... If the fish can hang in there any free floaters should be vaporized between the Ozone and UV. What method of Garlic are you using?
 
I've used freshly cut and mashed ginger in the past and it worked on 2 percs in my nano. Can't prove it was the ginger, but the ich was gone in a week and never came back. No adverse effects on my corals or inverts either. Might be worth a try.
 
Joe, I just read an article about using ginger...I may give it a try. Did you feed it directly to the fish or did you soak the food in it?

Eric, the garlic is seachem garlic guard. I also have some form 2 with garlic in it. I basically just soak the food in the garlic for 10-15 minutes then feed.

Thanks guys...I've had mild outbreaks in the past and it generally clears up in a couple of days...hopefully these fish can fight through it.
 
If you can trap and remove the infested fish, a FW dip works very well at removing what's already on them, but you still need to kill what's in the tank. If I remember right, I used a 1.010 SG FW dip for 1-3 minutes.

I had considerable success last year with a combination of garlic, cleaner shrimp and neon gobies (can't seem to find any neons lately). The neons were excellent at removing the parasites on the fish, while the garlic did a good job of keeping them off. I think the food additives may have worked to give the fish increased resistance. I also added about a tsp. of garlic water to the tank. Regardless, within a few days it was all gone and hasn't been back, even after adding stress to the tank (new fish, lighting change, moving the LR, etc.).

I used the water from a jar of minced garlic and Selcon as part of the blender based preparation -- sushi nori, cooked shrimp, scallops, squid, Formula 1 and 2 -- that I mixed and froze in a ziplok bag laid flat before cutting it into cubes for easy feeding. I toss a cube in each day and the fish literally leap at it.

The neons are very active cleaners, even cleaning my hand when it was in the water.

I've read that 5-Nitroimidazoles (a hot pepper extract) is in most ich treatments, which are so expensive it's ridiculous. Look under the lid of the 5-N preparations and you'll see the red pepper oil floating on the top. A half tsp. of tabasco or a few drops of Dave's Insanity Sauce has the same effect as any 5-N preparation (tabasco is just hot red peppers, vinegar and salt). 5-N either irritates the ich so they fall off, or irritates the fish's skin to increase slime production, or both. I used it once long ago for a tang that got a bad case of ich in a day. The treatment noticeably reduced the number of parasites within an hour, but they came back the next day. I wouldn't call it very effective on its own, but it could reduce the parasite numbers on the fish to give you time for the other treatments to start working.
 
Thanks Dan...getting the trophonts to fall off the fish is my first objective, I may try some tabasco. Then hopefully the UV and Ozone will take over, althought he research is skepitcal of whether ozone or UV have much of an effect on cryptocarren irritans...

I really don't want to remove the fish either and add undue stress upon them.

When its all said and done perhaps I'll use a little ginger, a little garlic, a little tabasco, some skunk eye and hair of the weasel.... :)

Oh and I can't forget the shaman to administer the concoction otherwise it won't work.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7603318#post7603318 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by COreefer
Joe, I just read an article about using ginger...I may give it a try. Did you feed it directly to the fish or did you soak the food in it?
Click to expand...

I cut it and mashed it up, then I shaved off slices of a formula 1 cube and mashed that into the mix. I took out the bigger pieces of ginger and left the small ones and fed that way. I felt like I was making a gourmet meal. I did this for about a week. The clowns would eat the tiniest pieces of ginger but the larger pieces they would spit out.

To be completely honest, I do not think this is what made the ich go away. I think they fought it off on their own, but the ginger did not hurt any other livestock or water parameters, so it couldn't hurt to try it.
 
Todd, there are afew signs on my longnose BF but the other fish seem ok...of course I haven't used that concoction to supplement their food because of the effect it had on my tank. Most likely it was the tabasco that negatively affected my tank.
 
It sure seems to have worked in the short term. I imagine the ozone will do the rest. Other than the clam getting irritated by the hot sauce, what other negative effects did you notice?
 
many effects on my corals...lack of polyp extension is the most notable...I wouldn't suggest anyone use this in a reef tank, that is for sure.
 
I think I am going to try the ginger, I have always noticed a little bit on my Powder Blue and think he would be happier with no extra baggage.
 
If it caused so much discomfort to the clam and corals, it probably kicked the ich's butt. Hmm...kick ich... Well, at least the cure wasn't worse than the disease. Sure glad you don't stock Dave's Insanity Sauce!

BTW, I've been using blender mix with Selcon and garlic water for over a year. The fish fight over it, and you've seen how well the SPS are doing.
 
ihad the same problem and talked to todd at neptunes realm, he gave me a metal free liquid product and it worked wonders. knocks ick right out.
 
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