Calgary Stores, Stocking Questions, and preparing my tank for Mandarins

[howdy20012002]

I think what people are suggesting is to capture all your current fish in your tank and put them in to a QT tank with the newcomers. then leave the main display tank completely fishless for 10 weeks and treat the QT with hyposalinity for that same time period.
If you don't have corals or many inverts I might suggest gathering up any inverts or corals and putting them into another smaller tank and treating your DT with hyposalinity for 2 months...otherwise you going to need a big QT tank with that many fish.
for the other question, use cupramine for treatment if you are going to use copper and make sure you test and retest...follow the directions as they as put forth by seachem..or the copper will kill your fish as quickly as the ich.
make sure you buy a chemical test kit.
copper will not destroy the biological filtre...however, any inverts in your tank will die off which could cause an ammonia spike...and if you test for ammonia, the copper in the system will cause a slight reading of ammonia.
I personally would suggest hyposalinity of around .10 for 2 months if you know it is only ich and not marine velvet.

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by howdy20012002

I think what people are suggesting is to capture all your current fish in your tank and put them in to a QT tank with the newcomers.

Correct, that's what we're saying.

[sphelps]

I think 10 weeks might be a bit aggressive, once fish are removed worst case all the ich will be in Tomonts within 24 hours and that stage can only last up to 4 weeks after which they hatch and can only survive a couple days without a host. So realistically 5 weeks is actually enough, 6 weeks to be safe, 10 weeks to be overkill.

[Leah]

And do not use the water from the DT for your water changes. Got it? Good!

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by sphelps

I think 10 weeks might be a bit aggressive, once fish are removed worst case all the ich will be in Tomonts within 24 hours and that stage can only last up to 4 weeks after which they hatch and can only survive a couple days without a host. So realistically 5 weeks is actually enough, 6 weeks to be safe, 10 weeks to be overkill.

The 9-10 week time frame is the result of peer-reviewed work on cryptocarion irritans that showed in extreme cases tomonts could produce viable and infective tomites up to 72 days after encystment. It's an extreme case, obviously, and likely represents less than a tiny fraction of 1% that will stay encysted for that long, but all it takes is one to start the whole process over again. If you're going to go through the nightmare of catching all your fish and treating them, isn't it worth it to wait the extra few weeks to be sure?

ETA: stupid auto-correct, though '...produce viable and infective tomatoes' did read pretty well for an auto-correct fail.