ICH breakout

[Phishdood]

Hello All,

I am new to the forums and this is my first post, have been doing alot of reading here and read some great posts with very helpful information. Anyways i have a 110g reef that i recently aquired from a friend who was moving. I had to put new live rock in it but the sand bed and filter were already established. Currently the stock of fish in the tank are 1 lrg yellow tang, 1 sm clown tang, coral beauty angel, 1 false percula, 2 green chromis, 4 various damsels. All the fish were doing great till i introduced the clown tang(no i didnt Quarantine him and now im regreting it). I treated the tank with kick ich(reef safe) and FW dipped the tang and thought he was getting better only to see a few days later it was worse. I have been feeding pellets containing garlic and seaweed select soaked in kent garlic extract. Went throught the whole 15 day treatment of kick ich and no luck. Now all the fish but the chromis and one damsel have ich. I just setup a 30 gal QT but have not transfered the fish yet. I am thinking that copper is the only thing that is going to work as i have tried everything else with no positive results. One question i do have is that will a UV sterlizer do any good to help prevent such an outbreak once the parasite is in the freeswimming stage? And from any experts here is there anything i could have done different in the initial stage of the breakout to prevent it from getting so bad. I tried to do a search on UV sterilizers on the forum but the function is not working. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Oh and by the way I love this forum, have learned alot from reading posts here

 

[Steven Pro]

UV might help a little, but it is unlikely it would completely eradicate the parasites.

 

[Sk8r]

The biggest risk for an ich infestation getting worse is a new tank, as far as I've ever observed. I don't know why, except the water is less stable and skin irritation is more common.

My best recommendation: test often, keep a log and never let a reading trend out of parameters: do preventative dosing while you're still within the safety zone, not catch-up. And once you've gotten all your fish healthy, don't keep adding fish. Stock up, stay stocked, and don't perpetually shop and add. Grow corals: at least you can sell/trade them.

Second piece of advice: stick to blennies, gobies and dragonets, which are resistent to the stuff, until your tank gets some age on it.

Third: don't buy a fish that hasn't been healthy in the fish store for weeks. I know, you risk losing him to another customer, but what fish store won't order another one? Be patient and flexible in your choices, and shop very slowly. Eventually you'll find the right fish.

These aren't great solutions, but I haven't lost a fish to ich in decades. I've had a few outbreaks, but nothing serious, and it's hard to say what I do to be lucky, just that I'm hyper-critical when shopping, I mostly have gobies, I'm never in a hurry to buy, and I watch my fish like a hawk. I'm very careful introducing the fish. I also feed garlic whenever a new fish enters my tank, just in case.

You're going to have to pull everybody for treatment, sorry to say. When it gets this bad, it's a PITA and you can have fatalities.

 

[Phishdood]

Yes i agree i should have been more careful with the purchase. The store owner told me the fish had been there for 2 weeks and was eating and that the the row of tanks that this particular fish was in, always are treated with copper. It was an impulse buy however and i am to blame. I never had an outbreak in the 58 reef i used to have and was very careful with the fish i introduced into that tank. Well tonight i will be taking the whole tank apart to catch all the fish and hopefully i can save some of them....wish me luck

 

[JollyGreen]

Man, that sucks, I just went through the same thing last night, only I have a 26 gal. Hope you don't have to tear too much apart to catch them all.

A trick I learned for searching reefcentral.com whenever I want! Go to google, and in the search box type "site:reefcentral.com whatever search words you want" It will make google only search reefcentral.com and it does very well with searching the forums.

JG