What do people with large tanks do when Ich is present?

This is contradictory to everything I've heard about this product, but like you, I couldn't't remove my fish, so I used No Sick Fish in my 230, along with garlic, a 57 watt UV, ozone, water changes and good water quality and the ich dissipated.
There are posts here from a lot of that people that could not remove their fish when an ich outbreak hit their tank. Most seem to find that with good water management and fish husbandry that ich will subside. In time it may, or may not show up again at some point (based on the answers we've had here so far).
I'd like to see this thread continue to grow so that we can all get a better idea of what were facing when removal is not an option.
Psionicdragon, you mentioned that you QT'd your fish with copper they didn't show Ich before being placed in your display. Is there anything else that you recently added that might have brought it in? I ask this to find out if it was there before the fish were introduced. It seems that no matter what precautions you take, stocking a large tank presents many opportunities to introduce ich into your system. Can you tell us what your methods of stocking the tank have been? I QT'd all my fish, but was not able to QT the corals, clams, snails, macro algae & pods. Knowing each persons situation is different, it would be helpful to know your program for introducing fish and inverts into your system.
Please keep us posted on what happen. That's what this thread is for, to see what happens after a breakout when removing the fish is not an option so that we can all make better informed decisions when or if Ich occurs.
Mine has completely settled down (to the naked eye and by fish behavior, though my Foxface looks stressed from something, but doesn't seem to be from the ich episode). Good Luck.
Guy
 
Just a thought and not sure if anyone has posted it yet. But i too have gotten ick in my tank before too and was not about to take all rock and all out to catch the fish, My tang and coral beauty seemed to get it the most.. I know there is meds for this but i wont put anything in my tank like that, so i went and got cleaner shrimp, there like a doctor to the fish, its amazing i got one and all the fish went to it so i decided one was not enough and got another one. Yeah there expensive like 20 to 25 per one but its worth it they picked the ick right off the fish and all and any other parasites.. You should look into gettin some i love my cleaner shrimp there the best...
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7257270#post7257270 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Psionicdragon
I hypoed my 300 when it had a major ick outbreak; however, I don't think I hypo'd it long enough because ick was still present.

But after a month, it disappear. I added new fishs recently and ick has reappear. Its covering my Powder Blue and some on my Clown Tang. Something is up with the Sohal, could be ick. I don't know since it doesn't come out anymore.

I run an ozone, but I guess its either not working or it works but not well enough. (I can't find help on the Gen-x one because it smells really bad after 2 weeks of operation even with tons of carbon in place.

I added a 9 watt UV, which was basically useless as it is too small.
In the same situation, it is too hard to pull everything out without losing some corals. either way, its a lose lose situation, but situations that can eliminate the ick.

I did QT my fish with copper and they didn't show any signs of ick in the tank. The sohal wouldn't eat anymore after Copper was introduced though.
Click to expand...

If you let your tank go fallow for about two months while you treat the fish with hypo, then you should be okay. Hypo treatment should last about six weeks or four weeks after no signs of ich is present. I heard copper does not mix well with pb tangs (not recommended). Good luck.
 
DouzeCordes, Thanks for your input. This thread is focused on what happens when you can't take the fish out of a tank, like a large reef tank. Here's a thread that has a lot of useful treatments and discusses ways to try to keep a tank ich free. http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=774229 .
aynoT79, I have three cleaner shrimp in my tank and my fish did the same thing. I think they definitely played a role in ending the ich cycle that I had. I am fortunate enough to have a cleaner wrasse that helps a lot too. I've heard a lot of negatives on keeping cleaner wrasses, and I agree with that, but this one was eating any type of food he was given, so I bought him. I figured he also had a better chance in my tank than a smaller one. He's been in there for 6 months, and I sure was glad to have him when ich broke out in my tank. The cleaner shrimp have a spot that they hang out at (close to my anemone's) and the fish will go back there, like we would to a car wash, and get cleaned. They are a great addition to a tank, unless you have to spot feed corals, then there more like a rat pack. But theres ways around that.
 
I have stopped using garlic (thank God, the smell is awful) and am now using Kents Zoe and Zoecon. All signs of ich are clearly gone. The last thing is my Foxface. He was weakened from the ich, so the vitamins seem to be the best route. About every two months I order macro algae from Indo pacific, which came in today. The Foxface loves the different types of macro that I get from them. I added my Sailfin 8 days ago and it looks great, heres a picture, I am encouraged from what I have seen so far about dealing with ich in a large reef tank. A year ago I would have panicked and tried to pull the fish out, which would have been a big mistake. I hope others will post their experiences of what happened in their systems when ich was present and the fish could not be removed. Surely there must be more of us that have experienced this.
80647Sally.jpg
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7262105#post7262105 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by guyguerra
I have stopped using garlic (thank God, the smell is awful) and am now using Kents Zoe and Zoecon. All signs of ich are clearly gone. The last thing is my Foxface. He was weakened from the ich, so the vitamins seem to be the best route.
Click to expand...


vitamins are key- I have done the uv,ozone,hypo,copper and the garlic-good for short term fix-nothing compares "in the long run" to supplementing your fish food with vitamins.I learned the hard way like most people, but it has always been funny to me how ich/cryp has depressed and defeated so many marine fish keepers,yet the lfs and most write ups push everything except vitamins-
 
It has been a month since I saw Ich in my large tank. I used several reef safe treatments, along with vitamins and water changes. I've always done weekly water changes so I just increased the amount of each change. My tank looks great, all the fish are healthy and there hasn't been any Ich spots in over 3 weeks. I am REALLY glad I didn't try taking the fish out. My reef is so well established now that I might have lost enough to consider giving up the hobby. I've been in this hobby for a while now and have learned many things. Since I didn't know what a QT was when I started, I had Ich immediately in my first tank which was a 120 FOWLR. Then I started a 50 gallon QT. I have tried every approach to kill Ich, and prevent Ich. My thoughts about it have changed many times. I've torn a tank down due to ich, I've done hypo, copper, reef safe stuff, and die hard QT practices. At this point I am with the crowd that believes most tanks have it, and that it can be dealt with without taking all your fish out. I'm also a life long believer that fish need to be quarantined before going into a display, and any of the proven treatments at that point are wise. But I would never consider tearing down a reef again because of Ich.
 
We all have a lot of time and $$$ invested in our systems. Big and small. I respect what the experts have to say but I take everything with a grain of salt. I've never had Ich kill a fish and I've had fish with Ich. Feed your fish a healthy diet, keep water clean, keep up with maintenance, provide a good environment and the fish should beat it. Usually if your system isn't healthy, your fish aren't healthy. How many stories have you heard of people putting fish in quarantine and a month after getting into the main display the fish comes down with Ich?
Tearing down a tank that large is not practical and probably worse for the fish after all is done. I'm glad it's working out for guyguerra. Good luck to your tank.
On a small and slight tangent . . . who hasn't heard from the experts that we are adding too many corals to our tanks, one per foot should be fine. . . I agree with this to a degree but it's not practical. Most of the experts sell or sold in the past to the hobby, the same hobby that supports many sites just like this. Almost all of these sites having tank of the month contests that honor grossly overstocked tanks (both fish and coral) . . . that are successful. Successful is the key word but down playing the hundreds that strive to copy those tanks and totally fail.
It's easy to stand on a soap box and quote your favorite expert of the month but sometimes that advice isn't practical even if the advice makes sense.
I'm getting off my box right now!
 
guyguerra,
Please let us know how things look after another month. I don't think 1 month is enough to say you are out of the woods, though I hope you are.

newschool04,
I'm not really following you. Are you giving the "experts" a hard time about recommended Ich treatment? While even they are not perfect, they do a much better job at helping us make educated decisions than the majority of anecdotal information randomly posted on RC that has minimal basis at best.

Also, which of the experts posted about overstocking corals? I know several of them that don't care for mixed-stocked tanks (i.e. sps and lps) but never heard/read about overstocking corals in general.

Not trying to start something--just asking questions! :)
 
who out there that has had an Ich outbreak and overcome it with good husbandry/quality foods etc, has added fish without the new fish getting ich?. I recently had an issue and lost my hippo tang. it has been 2 months since then and at least 6 weeks since I have seen any sign of the ich. I have been told that I could really never add another fish without risking another outbreak because the parasite is always going to be in my system unless I treat and allow tank to go fallow
 
no, not giving them a hard time at all. I'm just saying that sometimes it's not practical. Tearing down a 230 gallon reef, setting up quarantine tanks for your fish for two months, etc. A lot of people don't have the room or the supplies to do something like this. In this case you just try to provide the best environment and hope the fish can fight it off.
I believe in using a quarantine tank when you first get fish, sometimes it doesn't help though.
I'm not sure where I was going with the overstocking. I had a couple in me.
 
Hi Poknsnok, good to see you. Look at my post above from 4-27. I added the Sailfin that you see above after I saw the Ich spots, but only after I felt the tank was settled back down. That was over two weeks ago and he's doing fantastic. All of the fish are healthy. I'll be adding another helfrich firefish in about another month (my son is giving the one I gave him back to me). I agree that I want to wait another month for anything else just to be positive, as Ixthys mentions, but I am confident that all is well, I just want the longer term proof. I had the Sailfin in the QT and wanted to move him, that's why I did it when I did, plus the guys at the LFS came over and looked at everything (looked at the beer too) and thought it was ready. Again, my Sailfin is doing great.

This is why I started this thread, to try to stop some of the unproven opinions that a tank is ruined once you have ich in it, and that you have to pull all the fish and fallow the tank. I wonder how many people have left this hobby due to that type of advice. I would have stopped this time if I had to tear down my 230 gallon reef that I put so many hours and money into, and no one can say I wasn't careful with what I put in my tank. Everything went thru Quarantine. If your tank stays stable for two months or more, I think my advice, and the advice of many people on this thread would be to proceed with any future additions that you want.

I appreciate all the posts to this thread and hope there will be many more. We need to know more real experiances and real outcomes so that we don't possibly ruin tanks and kill fish needlessly. Please continue to post your experiances here if you have personally had Ich in your tank and didn't tear it down.
Thanks, Guy
 
I tend to be kind of philosophical about ich: it happens...not badly, unless there are other factors, or a particularly susceptible type of fish, which I try not to have. I figure if I ever got a perfectly non-iched tank, I'd get a snail or something that comes at least wet from fish-store water, and in comes the parasite in a water droplet off that snail...it's kind of a defeatist attitude I don't usually adopt about things, and I'd sure rather never have it, but there's only one thing I ever really took down a hundred gallon tank to get, and that was a ghost eel, for completely different reasons. I just put my faith in garlic---I almost think I should say hang it at the windows---and so far have lucked out.
 
Glad to hear that guy. i was all set to tear apart the 200 and take all the fish to QT. Im going to wait a while and concentrate on maintainance and the corals and try to add another hippo or purple tang down the road. But I will be sweating it!
 
I sure hope that's not bad advice: I'm always nervous about it, because there is a serious risk if luck is plain out. You might get special food to assure the fish do eat the garlic---I use a mortar and pestle and smash the food up in live garlic, though I've seen garlic powder from the kitchen work as well: I also maintain a cleaner shrimp if there's a problem, which I know can be a challenge in some FO tanks. Just count dots. If it gets better, you're winning. If it gets worse, even by a few dots, then you're back to your original choice.
 
This thread has given us some history of the experiences of others and what has happened to their tanks when Ich was diagnosed to be in the tank, and the fish couldn't be pulled out. This is what we are in this thread to learn. It is my hope that people will continue posting their experiances of what has happened to them when their fish couldn't be pulled from a tank for the treatment of Ich. What we need to know is the results that people have had.

I made the mistake of giving advice about Ich in this thread, and realized, that's not the topic, and I'm not an expert. There are no experts. The subject of Ich is as risky to bring up as religion or politics. If we can focus on only putting up posts that explain the history of your personal experience, we can each use the information to help make our own decisions as to what the best approach might be for our individual situations. If you look at my signature line below, you could change a few words and have it say " We are indeed all members of a single family sharing one source of water and fish in one huge house, and thru collective histories we can learn how to live with the source better"-Guy Guerra. Not near as intelligent or philosophical as the Dalai Lama, but he's never published a statement about Ich that I know of yet.

There are two threads that I made for this topic, and in hind sight I wish I didn't. After being a member for 1 1/2 years, I should have know better, but I was desperate to learn what others encountered in this situation, and felt like I had little time to do it. I've never emailed a moderator, but I'll see if I can, and ask them to tie them together if possible, so that we can see the history of more members. One thread is in "Fish Disease Treatment, the other is in "Large Reef Tanks".
 
In point of fact, and maybe due to plain luck, I can hardly remember losing a fish to ich...I've had it break out multiple times---some species carry it, I think, like the common cold---but only in freshwater have I ever seen one of my fish absolutely go under with it, and then it was only that one fish.
If I do have it break out, I concentrate on the fish that has it, and will special order live food if need be to get that fish eating like a pig. Plus garlic. I pay fanatic attention to water quality, especially alkalinity, which I think, perhaps mistakenly, has to do with skin irritation and slime coat.
The most recent time, I had a rabbit fish that broke out in it; I used garlic, and bought him all the weed he could eat...plus a cleaner shrimp, which he gracelessly ate when he got over the ich. One firefish showed one dot, then lost it, as I fed chopped shrimp soaked in garlic. I took the rabbit back to the lfs. Now I routinely feed sinking pellets (Formula One) that have garlic as an ingredient, and have no visible problem. I am also full-up on fish, and don't plan any additions. I plan for what I have to live for years.
 
Well, the proof will be in this pudding! I had a problem in my 50 gallon tank. It's a long story, but the tank overheated. My wife found the fish laying on the bottom of the tank and called me at work saying that all the fish died! I ran home, and saw that two of the three were breathing, more like gasping for air. I pulled them out put them in the fuge of my big tank. I found the third fish under a rock, so I put him in the fuge too. After an hour they revived and were swimming around. The fish are a brown tang, mystery wrasse and clown wrasse. I was going to to put the tang in the 230 when she got a little bigger, so I decided since she was now living in the fuge they might as well stay in the big tank, so today I put all three in the big tank. If Ich was going to be an ongoing problem, this should be when it is going to happen. I'll let you know next week. I think they'll be fine though. We'll see.
 
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