Well, I introduced ich to my tank with a poorly quarantined fish and payed the price - lost my favorite fish and had to completely tear apart the tank to get the survivors in a hospital tank. Then I followed what I thought was a reasonable plan to eradicate the ich from both fish and the DT:
1) treat the fish with 5ppm of Cupramine over four weeks in the hospital tank (plus two doses of Prazipro because of the convenience)
2) keep the DT fallow for 5 1/2 weeks (knowing that is on the shorter end of the recommended period but still usually deemed adequate)
The big day finally came this week to reintroduce my fish to the DT. Now my blue tang is showing signs of ich again, after less than 36 hours in the DT so I obviously did something wrong. But what?
Two nights in the DT seems too short for the tang to have reaquired the parasite from the DT so I assume that I never eradicated it from the hospital tank (even though I didn't see any visible marks on the fish after the first couple of days). I wonder if I screwed up my Salifert Cu test. THe instructions said to let the reaction sit for 10 min and then an additional 10 min to see if the color darkened more. Cu levels always read quite low after the first 10 min but right around .5 ppm for the second 10 min so I thought that I was okay... what do you think most likely went wrong? Did I misread the test?
I don't have much of a strategy for the future because I'm not up to tearing the tank apart to get my fish out for a new round of treatment. Assuming that this outbreak doesn't get worse than a few spots (no behavioral problems yet), I plan to thoroughly QT any future additions to the tank and treat them with Cupramine in the hopes of not introducing new strains of ich to see if it really does become inbred and die out in a year.
1) treat the fish with 5ppm of Cupramine over four weeks in the hospital tank (plus two doses of Prazipro because of the convenience)
2) keep the DT fallow for 5 1/2 weeks (knowing that is on the shorter end of the recommended period but still usually deemed adequate)
The big day finally came this week to reintroduce my fish to the DT. Now my blue tang is showing signs of ich again, after less than 36 hours in the DT so I obviously did something wrong. But what?
Two nights in the DT seems too short for the tang to have reaquired the parasite from the DT so I assume that I never eradicated it from the hospital tank (even though I didn't see any visible marks on the fish after the first couple of days). I wonder if I screwed up my Salifert Cu test. THe instructions said to let the reaction sit for 10 min and then an additional 10 min to see if the color darkened more. Cu levels always read quite low after the first 10 min but right around .5 ppm for the second 10 min so I thought that I was okay... what do you think most likely went wrong? Did I misread the test?
I don't have much of a strategy for the future because I'm not up to tearing the tank apart to get my fish out for a new round of treatment. Assuming that this outbreak doesn't get worse than a few spots (no behavioral problems yet), I plan to thoroughly QT any future additions to the tank and treat them with Cupramine in the hopes of not introducing new strains of ich to see if it really does become inbred and die out in a year.
