Is this Ich?

[mxmarks]

Hello-

Things have actually been going great in my tank (still working on pH however), and everything has finally become healthy -- until I saw this!

I have a yellow tang, Red Stripe angel, 2 clowns, zebra dartfish, pajama cardinal and royal gramma in my 75g tank. Everything has been very healthy and happy, and the cloudy eye that plagued my angel has finally all cleared up. I've been feeding food soaked in garlic for about 3 weeks now, as a precaution while I cared for the angel, and when everything had cleared up I decided to keep feeding garlic soaked food, because I figured it doesn't hurt.

Well, today I saw my gramma, and he seems to have 3 spots, close together on his tail. They do look white, but they're not a solid white. They're close together, and transparent. It was VERY hard to capture with a camera, but heres my best attempt.

you can see that at the upper tip of his tail, the yellow is a little more pronounced - that is the affected area. The spots are whiteish - but translucent. He's shown no signs of heavy breathing, and he still eats like a champ.

I've never seen ich, and the pictures Ive seen online don't seem to match - its just hard to tell because these spots are on a part of his body that is normally translucent, so I'm not sure if the white spots are normally more pronounced on a solid part of the body.

Right about now I'm even MORE angry my emerald crab killed my cleaner shrimp.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[MYDRAAL]

Sorry can't tell with that pic. It will start getting (spots) on other parts of its body, as time goes by watch the spots that it now has and see if it goes on other parts of the body. That emerald crab wouldn't have been able to get a hold of that shrimp if there wasn't something already wrong with it, are you sure it wasn't just a molt?

 

[mxmarks]

Well - the shrimp is a whole other story. It molted (saw the molt and the shrimp) and then I havent seen it since. I had a sally lightfoot and an emerald in there to (also a serpent star). I had read that sometime sally lightfoots will target shrimp right after they molt - so I assumed it was that. Until the next day when I saw a sally lightfoot leg (complete with crab meat that the clowns were feasting on) floating in the tank. So I just assumed the emerald (which Im now working on removing) did it all - but I guess it could have been the sally lightfoot ate the shrimp, and the emerald killed the lightfoot?

The tank has been running for about 8-9 months so if there's some murderer hiding in there, he's done a great job, as I havent seen anything that would kill the shrimp or the lightfoot - and the fish I listed above wouldnt have done it.

Thanks for the advice - sorry the picture is so horrible. Every time I try to get one it looks like this - my camera isn't catching the spots, just the fact that where the tail generally becomes very transparent, it isn't because of the spotting. On a closer look, its actually a bunch of spots (maybe 6ish), but they arent solid white. Just translucent, giving that portion of the tail a cloudy look.

 

[MYDRAAL]

You can do one of two things. Take all the fish out and quarantine them , treat them for parasite, and leave your main tank fallow for 6 weeks to make sure the ich dies out before reintroducing fish back into tank. Or you can keep feeding your fish, try to give them a stress free environment, and let them fight it off on their own. You may or may not loose fish taking the latter route. What ever you choose GL and I hope all goes well.

 

[CAROLGYRL]

when my fish got ich, it looked like a couple of pieces of sand( white-of course!!) on it. It showed up real well on my hippo. I fed it garlic , as I had been trying to catch it , get it used to the net, ect., but the spots went away. I did have a new naso tang that died, though from it. i had him out and was treating him, he was too small.

 

[Roy G. Biv]

I think there might be a spot of ich right there.