Well, Hypo is finally working, but my lost fish list from the first couple of days is depressing:
Powder blue tang
Cleaner wrasse
labouti wrasse
1 Bengali cardinal (the odd one out, the breeding pair made it)
and both of my firefish, though not from ich, one jumped over the dividing baffle between the low salinity chamber and the normal salinity display when I was doing a water change, I assume his kidneys exploded. The other one vanished yesterday for unknown reasons.
Everyone else is now spot free, eating and behaving normally. It's entirely possible that moving them to the QT system and lowering the salinity pushed already stressed fish over the edge, but by the looks of how bad it got in the first 48 hours after they went in to hypo, I would say I was probably on track to lose everything if I hadn't gotten them out when I did. I read an article that said C. Irritans can increase it's population by 10 times in a week in a closed system, so if there's a stressed fish spouting off tomites by the dozen, the population of theronts can quickly increase to levels that will overwhelm even resistant and healthy fish. I bet it really comes down to a numbers game.
FW dips rid my fish of the majority of their spots at the beginning, but it was too late for the powder blue. I've never seen anything like that before, it was really awful. The cruel irony is that I think the FW dip (which he seemed to tolerate perfectly well in the hours after he received it) actually killed all the parasites on his body, as the next morning he was spot free, but he was also barely breathing and getting blown about by the current either upside down or sideways. I can only imagine what that many tissue ruptures at the same time must have done to his body's internal chemistry.
My biggest problem now is controlling the cycle that's resulted from putting them all in there. I'm doing 30% daily water changes and dosing copious amounts of aqua vitro Alpha, along with a boat load of Stability every day. No one has shown any signs of ammonia poisoning, but yesterday I started detecting nitrites so I'm a little worried.
Once I'm done with the hypo cycle (28 more days to go!), I'm going to spend 3 or 4 days bringing it back up to normal sea water, then initiate a 3 week daily dosing of Seachem paraguard. Seachem assured me in their forum that all of the ingredients break down after about 24 hours in salt water so I don't have to worry about anything leaching back in to my system from the rocks. Once that's done, there will be a two week 'cool down' period of heavy carbon filtering before I return them to the main display.
I know there are ways to control ich in a system through good nutrition and appropriate husbandry, but if you ask me it's a ticking time bomb. After this, there won't be a single fish added to my system who doesn't first get a fresh water dip, then a 3 week treatment of either paraguard or cupramine, then another 2 weeks for observation.
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