I tried hypo, it didn't work for me. To give the method it's fair due, my protocol wasn't exactly perfect, but I don't put much stock in it in general. Copper makes sense to me because its a poison and has been directly shown to kill free swimming stages of the parasite in published literature, and tank transfer makes sense because its designed around breaking the known and published life cycle of the parasite, but hypo works based on an assumption that 100% of the cryptocaryon irritans population has a magic salinity tolerance threshold of 1.009 SG. That assumption is repeated as fact in forums, and seems to work for some people (and thus, some populations of crypt), but it also seems to fail for more people than the other two methods. I have no doubt that some of those failures are due to protocol problems on the aquarist's part, but I would bet money that some of those failures are because some strains of ich can tolerate any salinity a fish could survive, especially if its been acclimated slowly to that salinity with your fish. It's already been documented in brackish estuaries and tidal river systems, so there is definitely a wider range of salinity tolerances in the population than previously believed.
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12-11-2012, 08:01 PM
Hybrid Mode
