ICH/snails/quarantine

ebe

Member
I have a 55 gallone quarantine setup. It has never had a fish in it. The initial water came from my display which is ICH free. I have snails/hermits in it now and they have been in it for 4 full weeks. Nothing else has been added since. Can I assume that there is no ICH at this point and move the snails/hermits to my display?

Thanks.
 
One of the local shops around my area had a tang with full blown ich in his tank with snails, etc. He said the snails would be fine, no need to quarantine. Needless to say, I did not buy anything from his tanks.
 
Snails and hermits need to be QT'd for really 3 weeks at 80F......longer if the temp is lower. Fish need 6 weeks as crypt can be at different levels of development and you want to make sure that the fish has time to be reinfected if the parasites are not all killed off. Snails and hermits would only have parasites in the tomont stage and at 80F, they will burst within the 3 weeks and nothing will get reinfected if there are no fish in the same water.....and only fish can get infected. The snails and hermits themselves cannot carry the parasite, just their calcareous shell......if a tomont attached to it while that snail or hermit was in an infected system. Shrimp, anemones and other inverts cannot transmit crypt.......unless they are attached to a piece of rock or other calcareous material that the tomont may have encysted upon. I would think you are good to go at this point with your inverts.......as long as you have not had them at 72F or lower.
 
Marine ich is NOT very temperature sensitive. It is an old myth. Fresh water ich is and that is were the rumors come from.

Typical ich life cycle

C_irritansLifeCycle.gif
 
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