I guess the real question is (for those who claim Kick Ich worked for them) would your fish have survived the Ich outbreak anyway? We made the mistake of not QTing a pair of butterflies about a month ago. Yep, they came down with Ich 2 days later. We removed them to QT to treat with hyposalinity, but they were dead the next morning. There is no way the Ich killed them that quickly, but I do think that the stress of catching them (it took us over an hour to get one of them), the stress of the disease, and the stress of the change in salinity ALL contributed to their quick death.
Obviously we knew that they may have infected the rest of the tank, and sure enough 5 days later we saw the beginning sign of infection on 2 more fish (blue hippo and foxface). We really searched thoroughly here on RC and found that *a few* people felt that Ich was survivable if your tank was otherwise healthy, your fish well fed, your water conditions pristine, and that you had cleaner animals in the tank.
We added a 2nd cleaner shrimp as well as 2 cleaner wrasse, and started soaking all food with garlic and Selcon. It's now 3 weeks later, and while the Blue tang did get the 2nd flush of ich which was much worse (as expected with the Ich lifecycle) he continued to eat well, was very active and seemed to be having only slightly rapid gilling. He has now seemed to "kick" (pardon the pun) the rest of the noticeable spots. The Foxface (the only other fish that saw the initial spots) never got any other signs of the disease.
Now?? We are CAUTIOUSLY optimistic about the display tank, and we have now set up a new 20g QT tank so we don't run into this problem again with any new additions. So, for those of you that used Kick Ich effectively, *perhaps* you would have been just as effective using nothing at all? Perhaps your fish were otherwise healthy and were able to fight off the disease themselves.
Some of you will wonder why we didn't remove all the fish to QT and let the display remain fallow for 6 weeks, and the answer is quite simply that I could not imagine doing that without totally stressing the fish that were going to be crowded into a 20g QT (which is the largest we can house and afford) How would we fit all those fish (including 2 tangs and 2 very bossy damsels) without just making the situation worse? We decided that we took everyone's advice and knowing that there would be no guarantees, we decided to give the "natural" way a shot.
So far, it seems to be working though we don't consider ourselves out of the woods yet.
I also found this thread very helpful
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/s...&highlight=Ich OR ICH AND sanely&pagenumber=1
Just my 2 cents after hours of reading on here (and btw...if I had any other advice to offer you I would suggest purchasing a premium membership so you can use the search engine when you need to). It really is invaluable and saves tons of time!
Good luck to you!
Steph
