Copper in quarantine?

[Baldy]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I think the other main problem with hypo salinity is that it's not always a magic bullet cure. Whether it will work for you depends as much on what strain of C. irritans you're dealing with than the method itself. Red Sea variants of C. irritans are endemic to highly salty water, with the hypothesis being that because of that, they're easily damaged by reduced salinity environments. The early studies from the 70s and 80s on ich control where the idea of hypo as a treatment came from appear to have been done using variants that were innately susceptible to lowered salinity, likely due to where in the world they came from. Since then there's been several other strains of the parasite identified. The more people study it, the more plastic an resilient the parasite seems to be. Since the 90s there's been several other 'strains' of C. irritans identified - so far no one has gone far enough to classify them as different species - but the newer variants are showing up in places and conditions that people didn't previously think were possible. There's a strain from Australia that happily completes it's entire life cycle in brackish estuaries, and appears to have a genetic adaptation to an extremely broad range of salinities.

Later studies on ich have shown that reducing salinity to 'hypo' conditions was not sufficient to eradicate the parasite, and there's been a conversation in the literature that the conflicting results from one study to the next were possibly due to the specific strain the authors of the various studies were working with.

The problem for hobbyists, is that you have no idea what variant of ich you're dealing with, and considering how fish from the red sea, Australia, the South Pacific, and basically anywhere else in the world we get fish from end up in the same tanks in LFS, there's a good chance any one hobbyist's system is infected with different strains from all over the world.

I like the idea of hypo because it's the easiest and least labour intensive, and if you're concerned with pH, making a concentrated baking soda solution and adding small amounts of it can bump it up really easily, but it's another one of those treatments that might work, or it might not, and you've got no way of knowing going in whether it will work for you. It works for enough people that it persists in the forums and blogs as a method, but it fails for a lot of people as well, who are then left scratching their heads and getting told they must have done something wrong (which, in many cases I'm sure is true).

The only thing I'd say about it is to take the X salinity for X weeks instructions that are out there with a grain of salt, as I don't think the global population of C. irritans necessarily got the memo that they were all supposed to have a self destruct sequence at a number that we find to be convenient and safe for our fish. If it doesn't work for you, know that there's as good a chance that your particular strain of ich was never going to be cured by hypo (or copper for that matter) as there is that you did something wrong.

The success or failure of each of the methods of treating ich depends on so many factors that have nothing to do with the treatment being applied, and everything to do with the specific strain and conditions of your tank during the outbreak, and that often gets overlooked when people are trying "eradicate ich". Two people can apply the exact same protocol and have different results, because their 'starting conditions' were also different.

in no way am I disagreeing with you as it seems you definately know what you are talking about. But how would you go about treating an ich outbreak?