What are the odds of Ich Recovery?

[Amazon4]

I'm having a bad week. I QT'd some anthias for 6 weeks and the day after going in my new tank the male showed up with ich. I lost two of the three fish in two days.

If a fish develops ich, what are the chances it's strong enough to survive the outbreak?

I have a scopas tang that this morning woke up to being covered with ich, and the doliatus (rabbit) has it but not quite as bad.

They're in a 180 - I think trying to catch them would just aggrevate the situation.

I put in a cleaner shrimp last night from another tank. The remaining female anthia keeps laying down in front of it for a cleaning and the shrimp ignores her. This morning the scopas and rabbit have surrounded the shrimp as well.

I feel quite helpless watching these fish go through this.

Ich is EVIL. I can't believe we don't have a reef safe way to erradicate it. (sorry, just venting)

 

[flameangel88]

I don't think cleaner shrimps will be able to clean the ich off the fish fast enough and from my own experience they don't do much cleaning. The cleaner wrasse is the only fish I've seen to do the cleaning but unfortunately they don't survive long in the tank.

With that said, I've used Chem-marin Stop Parasite for ich 3 times in the last 3 years and have not lost any inverts or corals (but I never had any of the expensive stuff) to it. This is only good if you administer early on and I've combined this with heavy soaking of food in vita-chem (of selcon) and garlic guard and all the fishes have recovered. Try to minimize stress by keeping the tank dim and low traffic in front of the tank.

Good luck!

 

[kevin2000]

Ich is easy to kill .. just QT the fish and use hypo or copper. You will have to leave th show tank without fish for about 5 weeks in order for the ich within the fishless tank to die off.

Always QT fish before introducing them to your show tank .. in the long run it saves you lots of money and headaches.

 

[rydr119]

A friend of mine had an ICH outbreak in a new tank of his and he used ICH Attack. Its reef safe and it seemed to work his tank has been ICH free since. I have never used it but I did see his results, can't hurt to try.

 

[dclaghorn]

I had an outbreak right before Christmas. Took out everything (one tomini, powder brown, naso, hippo, 5 green chromises, one ocellaris clown) but one green chromis. I didn't have a QT at the time, but even if I did have what I have now, it's only 24 gal. Most people's QTs are smaller than their DTs. QT helps, but isn't necessarily the end all, be all answer. Case in point, I just lost a mated pair of ocellarises to Brookynella, and they were QTed for 2 weeks before introduction to the DT (3-4 months ago). WHERE THE HECK DID THE BROOKLYNELLA COME FROM? Did it hitch in on a coral? So, you should indeed QT your fish, but like you did, it's not the end all-be all. That being said, when the damage is finally done, let your tank lie essentially fallow for 4-6 weeks before anything new comes in.