quarantine question

[saleencobra]

I have had some fish in quarantine for almost 2 months now. they had ich when I bought them so I dropped the salinity to try and break the cycle.after 2 weeks I gave up on hypo and dosed with copper. the ich was gone in a week.the question is does copper kill the ich? do you only have to wait 30 days when you use hypo ?

 

[gotoneon]

If you treated properly with copper and you have not seen any signs of ick in the past 30 days then I would say you are in the clear. Copper and hypo(for ich) basically do the exact same thing, they kill it and stop the cycle from continuing. You can't treat some criters with copper and some fish do not do well in hypo. I have done both with great results and have never lost a fish in QT. knock on wood. Just curious, why did you give up on the hypo?

 

[saleencobra]

hypo did not seem to be working. I could not stand to watch them suffer. I was amazed at how quick the copper worked. thanks for the response

 

[Psionicdragon]

hypo doesn' tkill the ick directly, it just ruptures the sack before they explode into tons of parasites.

 

[dous]

which treatment takes longer? I know that hypo needs to be done for 6 weeks with weekly water changes and SG of 1.009 (is that correct?)

While copper needs to be at 0.5ppm with weekly water changes as well, but for how long?

 

[LargeAngels]

Hypo only kills ich and only if you use an acurate measurement device.

If hypo was not affective it may not have been ich, but velvet. hypo does not kill velvet. Also, FW dips do NOT work for ich, but does work for velvet (if the parasite has been attached for more than 24 hours.)

For copper treatments I only use Cupramine now. It is much more tolerated by copper sensitive animals and has been, IME, extremely affective for ich and velvet.

Here is some good reading. http://www.petsforum.com/personal/trevor-jones/treatments.html