ich help

[Simons]

after 15 years in the hobby, my experience has been once a tank has had ich, it seems to hang around. Most fish will get sick, the strong ones will build up a tolerance or perhaps somewhat of an immunity to it. But every time I add a new fish to my Marine tank, it gets ich, none of the other fish do however.

It seems, from my experience that healthy fish will survive it, but the parasite never seems to go away in my saltwater tank.

I have not had an outbreak in my freshwater tank for years, but then again, I have not added any new fish in years! I would agree though with other comments, to keep the fish healthy I would feed more often and perhaps, a larger amount than normal (as long as they are all eating it). That way it keeps their strength up, there could be a fish or two that will stop eating during the nastiest part of this parasites life cycle those are the ones that are hit and miss. If they were eating well and generally healthy before, they should survive it.

I am done with adding copper of any form, it didn't work for me and all it did was make two of my fish blind and then died weeks after. I just let the cycle run it's coarse and since all my current fish have had it before, I think they are fairly hardy.

AND I just noticed this was a dormant thread...not sure why I responded to it months after..sorry about that.

[asylumdown]

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.

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.

[sam]

well lost my scorpas tank due to ick.
just went peacefully.. ick sucks..... this scorpas tang i had was 6 yrs old...

[scubadawg]

You're lucky, I had a kole, powder brown, chevron, 2 purple dottyback, 1 clown, 2 Heniochus so far this week

[scubadawg]

Lost a medium size Naso, 2 yellow tangs, and a clown fish, in the last 2 days

[drabber]

while stocking my current tank i had a few fish develop ich after introducing. i use an oversized uv sterilizer, garlic soaked food and cleaner shrimp. works every time... never lost a fish.

velvet on the other hand.... not sooo much