Quote:
Originally Posted by mikepclo
12 weeks without fish in DT and ich still came back without new livestock added. So flaw could be from any part of the life stages. So from my personal experience there seems to be a flaw somewhere. Maybe different strains? But 12 weeks didn't eradicate them.
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If the research on ich has shown anything, it's that there's way more variability within the C. irritans species than anyone ever knew. Cysts have been observed remaining dormant for 72 days and still producing infective stages in the laboratory before. That was one strain in one study. No one has identified the mechanism ich tomonts use to time their 'hatching', so I would very easily believe that some strains have an innate capacity to stay encysted even longer. I've seen it posted somewhere (maybe on RC?) that some people have had to fallow tanks for as long as 4 months to completely rid them of ich.
There's a posting from someone from Seachem in their product forums (I think it's in a thread regarding Paraguard) suggesting adding water from your QT system back to your display after you're 100% sure that ich has been eradicated from the QT system. Their logic is that the ich tomonts are sensitive to the presence of fish hormones, and that adding water from a fish system to your display will trigger the more stubborn cysts to hatch. It's never been tested in the published literature, but it's a really interesting idea.