Dt hypo treatment

[Mike-fish]

Hi all

I'm considering dropping the 270g into hypo to treat the ich problem I have currently. I'm currently dosing herbtana day 3 but I have little faith in it after doing some reading. The plan would be transfer the corals and nems to a holding tank during the treatment rather than tear apart the dt to reduce the stress on the fish. Then start dropping the dt to a sg of 1.009 for 6-8 weeks then slowly bringing it back up to1.025 over 2 weeks.
The stocking list is:
1 purple tang
1 one spot fox face
1 valigmi tang
1 powder blue tang
1 sailfin tang
2 clowns
1 copper band butterfly
1 cleaner wrase
3 chromis
2 fire fish

The only ones without ich are the cleaner wrasse and the firefish.

So does this plan sound good or will it back fire. Any thing else I should know about.

[gregzz4]

Plan sounds good, but transfer your LR too or you'll lose a lot of life in it
Basically, everything except the fish, and you'll lose a lot of life in your sand, but I'd recommend leaving the sand, or replace it. Don't try to transfer it.
Leave the holding tank for the LR, corals et all fallow for 9-11 weeks
Take 3-4 days to drop the DT Sg, 4 weeks of 1.008-1.009 ( no higher ), up to one week to raise back to 1.025 ( or your preferred Sg ) with no more than .003 increases per day
From there, I like to watch the fish for another 3-4 weeks to ensure the MI is gone
Then everything can go back in the DT, given you've done the minimum 9 weeks fallow period for the MI to die off in the holding tank

Of course, you're going to need to feed the corals etc and a filter of some kind on the holding tank, with testing, is a good idea

Lots of testing for NH3, NO2 and NO3 is a good idea, in both tanks

Lastly, it can be difficult to keep Hypo pH close to 8.0. If it's close, leave it
If it drops below 7.8, buffer it with baking soda, and use lots of aeration to help keep it up

[Mike-fish]

I thought the rock would be fine.

[gregzz4]

Dropping your Sg with the LR in the tank will slow down the nitrifying bacteria, so no big deal, but it will possibly kill a lot of worms, and all starfish, pods etc

[Mike-fish]

I don't have many starfish if any. And getting rid of some bristle worms would actually be a nice plus they've caught on to the trap it seems

[asylumdown]

The most current scientific research on C. Irritans doesn't bode we'll for hypo as a treatment. That's a pretty massive, system re-setting intervention for something that's not guaranteed to work IMO.

There's lots of variants of ich in this trade. If your variant happens to be from a place like the NE coast of Australia, hypo probably won't work as variants from Australia can natively occur in natural "hypo" conditions. If you're lucky and your variant is from the Red Sea, it might work. If you have more than one variant though... Well, anyway it's a huge roll of the dice no matter what you do. I've done a near masters level of research on this parasite and I can say that I won't elbother with manipulating salinity as a control method again.

[gregzz4]

Have at 'er if you want to Hypo your rock
I did a small piece in the QT and it killed aiptasia :smile:
Plus all the big worms came out for capture, and it killed ugly palys, tube worms, feather dusters and the like

Just keep in mind that all the die-off in it will add to any potential ammonia issues, and slow down your DT's recovery after you re-introduce the fishies

Up to you, but I wouldn't hypo my rock
It's like starting over, but without any bacterial filtration

[gregzz4]

The most current scientific research on C. Irritans doesn't bode we'll for hypo as a treatment
Don't go scaring him from trying it Adam :smile:

If, after 4 weeks of Hypo and another 4 weeks of regular Sg, he doesn't see any MI, he'll be fine
If he has to go beyond that and use some kind of copper, at least his fish will be in an environment that it can be used, and his other critters will be in a fallow situation

[gregzz4]

By the way, I can't stress enough the need to keep the Sg below 1.009
All the reading I did showed enough proof that above 1.009, and as much as 1.010, allowed MI to live

I kept my round of Hypo @ 1.008

[George]

I wouldn't do hypo in that large of a tank. First of all, you still have to take out a lot of salt water to replace it with fresh water. It's not that much more work to just drain the tank enough to catch all the fish.
Second, there will be a lot of die-off's in your DT if you have live rock, live sand in there with hypo. You skimmer won't work in hypo. A lot of organic. Ammonia will be a problem. Dosing ammonia binding thingy will get expensive in that large of a tank.
Also there are some researches showing that a certain strain of marine ich can survive below hypo salinity. Your chance of getting that strain may be low, but still a chance...
good luck with whatever you decide to do.

[gregzz4]

I agree with George, but sometimes the solution is to keep the fish in a tank large enough to house them, and transfer the other critters to a smaller, more manageable tank for the duration

Good luck with whatever you do :smile:

[Mike-fish]

So then what would you recommend. I would rather stay away from copper and keep the stress to a minimum for the fish

[gregzz4]

So then what would you recommend. I would rather stay away from copper and keep the stress to a minimum for the fish
Who are you responding to ?

[Mike-fish]

All. I still have the 175g that I could bring online and do hypo in instead that way there would be no rock or sand to deal with but I can't dose copper in that tank as I plan to sell it soon. What method would be the best to treat them. I also have an empty 80g that I could use but again no copper allowed.

[gregzz4]

I'm in the 'no copper' group, so I vote for the Hypo routine
I'll stress again ... 1.008 worked for me. 1.009 can border on the limits of resistance, so do as you will

Whether you remove your fish, or remove your inverts corals and LR is up to you

Whatever makes your life easier and makes the most sense

I know you're looking for an answer, but you have to make up your own mind

Put all your fish in one tank, and the rest in another :razz:

[Reef Pilot]

Every time I have used hypo, I was 100 % successful. I did have some live rock, and the bristle worms died, but that's all I noticed. I didn't have much for pods in my QT. With all the water changes to get the salinity down, and a mature canister filter, I didn't have any water quality issues.

Of course this was in 30g QT, so can't say what will happen in a large DT full of live rock.

As has been already stated here, and I will say it again very emphatically, be sure to get it down to 1.008 or 9. Use a calibrated refractometer. And keep it there for at least 6 weeks.

If you do this, please let us know how it works. I have never heard of anyone going hypo with a large DT.

[Aquattro]

If you have a spare 175 lying around, I'd drain the DT to get the fish out. I've drained my 180 a couple times now and it's not a big deal if you have something to hold the water for 20 minutes. Siphon out with a 2" dia. hose, pick out fish, pump water back into tank. House them in a temp smaller tank where you can manage treatment better.

[Mike-fish]

Is there any preferred method of treating

[howdy20012002]

I would recommend the hypo as well
you will have some die-off of the worms and such..but the bacteria should be fine as it can adjust to hypo conditions
I personally would take the corals and inverts out with a 1/3 of your life rock
drain half your tank and fill it up with fresh water
sounds scary..but I have done it numerous times
you can than adjust your salinty the next day to bring it down to the .009
(probably about a 1/3 of your tank to be emptied and filled again with fresh water)
leave it like that for 6 weeks just to be safe
and slowly raise your salt over a 3 day period.
I have done it numerous times without problem
I wouldn't recommend copper for ich
if you notice the fish still have ich after a week..then copper is required because you would have one of the rare strain of hypo-resistant ich

if you treat your fish without LR in whatever style you try, you will have to be doing substantial and frequent waterchanges which would be probably problematic for such a long period of time.

[George]

Is there any preferred method of treating

A list of methods to treat/QT for marine ich based on order of my preference:
1. Tank transfer
2. Copper
3. Hypo
4. Chloroquine Phosphate
and yes, I tried them all. :)
There are pros and cons for each method. Make sure you read them all (not only this site but some other sites as well) before you pick one. Above all, understand the life cycle of marine ich is very important regardless which method you pick.
Good luck.

[asylumdown]

Tank transfer method would be my #1 as well, because it's guaranteed to work on the fish. However, the tank transfer with that many large fish would be a logistical nightmare and would be very labor intensive on your part. Tank transfer also doesn't do anything about the encysted tomonts in the display, so after the 12 day transfer protocol was done you'd need to fallow the tank for a couple months.

Hypo would be my next choice, only because it's easy to do and doesn't involve poisoning fish.

Copper would be choice three. And only if you can do it in a separate QT tank with no sand or rock.

Can I ask what's making you decide to do this? Are you losing fish due to the ich, or do you just want it gone?

The only option that doesn't involve fallowing your display tank for 9-10 weeks is the hypo of the display, but man, that's going to be a cycle to stay on top of.

[Mike-fish]

As the ick has been steadily gaining ground and getting worse. I've uped the dose of herbtana to see if that helps. So far I've had no results with it. I haven't lost any fish yet but it's getting to the point that I'm in need of treating it. I had ick in the 175 off and on but between the cleaner wrasse and shrimps I would never see more than 6 spots on the powder blue. ( previous one lost shortly after the upgrade) Neal I thought you were a copper fan.

[scubadawg]

I'm dealing with ich on my 2 heniocus, and up my temp to 82 f, ich is going down, hasn't spread, I pick up a bottle of Herbtana and Kordon Ich attack, have tried medication yet, it I see any on my other fish, then I will medicate, so just adding more garlic into food. It just showed up 2 days ago. The heniocus had ich in my QT, and cupermine them for 3 weeks. Then I transfer to display tank on Feb 14.

[howdy20012002]

i use copper in my quarantines because hypo requires such a long treatment process.
plus hypo doesn't work against marine velvet which can sometimes come in on shipments

[howdy20012002]

asylumdown - do you have a link to the scientific papers that state that there is a hypo resistant ich?
i would like to read up on it if possible
thanks

btw, Herbtana is not a treatment - it is an immune booster. It does not kill ich..just increases the chance of the fish to fight it off.
so it will not help eliminate the ich in your system

[lockrookie]

I used a product called rid ich I believe it's been so long but it's totally reef save and did wonders

[Mike-fish]

Im aware that herbtana is an immune booster. I think I will run herbtana untill Saturday if I've seen no improvement I will begin to make preparations for the 175 to use as a hypo tank that way it's a smaller water volume to deal with and will prevent an accidental cycle. As there will be almost no rock ( wrasse sleeps in a specific rock. What would be the best thing to provide them with cover?

[e46er]

I use PVC fittings and short pieces of pipe in my QT for cover

[daniella3d]

same here, 100% sucees 3 times. I never got ick in my display tank. I always used liverock in my QT with hypo and that did not destroy the biofilter at all.

It did kill all the pods, stars and bristle worms but that did not impact on the water quality and I never had ammonia in the tank.

I think bad water quality is No1 reason why fish die in QT. I had a Magnum HOT filter with a micron filter and that also help to trop the freeswimming parasites.

I would not do it in a large display tank though. I would move some of the rock into a QT. I was using 0.009 with a calibrated refractometer.


Every time I have used hypo, I was 100 % successful. I did have some live rock, and the bristle worms died, but that's all I noticed. I didn't have much for pods in my QT. With all the water changes to get the salinity down, and a mature canister filter, I didn't have any water quality issues.

[asylumdown]

I'm not saying it's not something that ever works, as referenced by the people on here who have had success with the method, but there are just as many posts on the various forum boards of the method failing for people. The usual response on the forum boards is that the person administering it did something wrong, when I think there's just as much of a chance that in many of the failed cases, the person was dealing with a variant of ich that had a greater halotolerance than their fish.

Papers - there's some earlier papers from the 70s that talk about halo-tolerance, but I' going to start with Colorni's work in the 80s as I think it's what really laid the foundation for understanding how to control C. irritans in culture:

Colorni, A. 1985. Aspects of the biology of Cryptocaryon irritans, and hyposalinity as gilt-head sea bream Sparus aurata. Diseases of Aquatic Organisms.

- In this paper it was found trophonts could drop off the fish and successfully encyst in to tomonts between 15-60ppt (1.011-1.045 SG), but only successfully incubated to produce tomites between 25-50ppt (1.019-1.038 SG). They found that temporary exposure (up to 48 hours) to even lower salinities didn't damage the tomonts, and they still went on to hatch after bringing the salinity back up. I think this is the main paper from which we got 'hypo' as a method as it seems to suggest that an extended exposure to reduced salinity will allow all trophonts to drop off, encyst, and then fail to mature if you leave them in there long enough. However, it's important to note that the author was using crypt samples that have become known in the literature as the 'Israeli isolates'. The author also noted that at reduced salinities, the tomonts could exhibit the longest incubation period, and the tomonts were much more resistant to damage when the change in salinity was gradual (ie, exactly how people start hypo), so the authors suggestion for control using hypo was:

"In the beakers in which salinity was reduced for 3h to 10% (10ppt or 1.008SG) 4 times at 3 d intervals, tomonts were de- stroyed after each treatment and the fish were free from infection in 5 to 8 d. Similar results were obtained when this procedure was applied to the 4500 and the 14000 l tanks."

This is not how we typically engage in hypo, and this test was done using Sea Bream, not super sensitive reef fish. They also talk about freshwater dips as a method to get rid of the parasites that are actively feeding on the fish:

"Herwig (1978) and Cheung et al. (1979) suggested hyposalinity as an alternative way to reach the trophonts and upset their osmotic balance. However, in the present study, embedded trophonts did not seem to be affected by a freshwater treatment of the host for as long as 18h."

basically, they found that freshwater dips had zero action against embedded C. irritans parasites on the host fish. They're too protected by the skin and mucous of the fish.

I'm pretty sure that this is also the first paper in which the tank transfer method was was noted to have 100% efficacy against the parasite, but in any case it's the best case for using hypo as we currently use it in the hobby.

Colorni, A., Burgess, P. 1997. Cryptocaryon irritans Brown 1951, the cause of ‘white spot disease’ in marine fish: an update. Aquarium Sciences & Conservation.

- A really good overall read on the parasite, it also acknowledges that what was known in 1985 when the last paper was published was only a tiny part of the story, and that ich is naturally present in a much wider range of habitats and temperatures than previously thought. They talk a lot about the extreme asynchrony of tomont excystment and how that's very likely an evolutionary adaptation (and also why it's so damn hard to get out of a system once it's in). They talk a lot about chemical control methods such as copper and formalin, and re-iterate that tomonts are most susceptible to rapid salinity changes, and re-state the hypo method that I quoted above. They also note that some tropical fish can't handle that kind of a treatment, and re-state that the tank transfer method is effective at eliminating an active infection in fish in 7-10 days. They also mention a 4th method that you don't see used very often that I'll explain more in a bit.

Diggles, B. K., Lester, R. J. G. 1996. Variation in the development of two isolates of Cryptocaryon irritans. The Journal of Parisitology.

- This is the first paper that gives really solid evidence that not all strains of ich are created equal. They looked at two variants from the Eastern coast of Australia, one from Moreton Bay near Brisbane, and one from 700km north off Heron island. life cycle, and morphologic analyses showed way more variation than they were expecting, suggesting that everything from timing, temperature tolerances, salinity tolerances, to size and host preference is variable within the species. The Moreton Bay strain came from waters with naturally low salinity (down to 25ppt, or 1.019 SG), and temperatures as cold as 15C.

Diggles, B. K., Adlard, R. D. 1997. Intraspecific variation in Cryptocaryon irritans. Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology.

- Here they collected 16 isolates of C. irritans from Australia, Israel, and the US and compared them genetically. Their data suggested that there's warm and cold water variants of the parasite, and, importantly, that culturing parasites in laboratory conditions lead to significant temporal genetic variation (ie, the captive bred stuff looked different from the wild caught stuff over time). It looked like captive propagation for study was selecting for specific traits, suggesting that some of what's published about C. irritans in the literature might have more to do with the 'founder effect' of the particular variant that survived to be studied than the species in general. However, the most important part of this paper from a hypo perspective (:

"Tomonts of the Moreton Bay strain can survive salinities less than 10ppt [1.008 SG] (BKD, unpubl. data), whereas those of the Israel isolates undergo cytolysis at 10ppt [6]. Given that the Moreton Bay isolates originate from an estuary (normal salinity range 20ppt-35ppt), and the Israel isolates originate from the Red Sea (40ppt), it is plausible that these differences in halotolerance have evolved as a result of environmental selection pressures."

(Note: I changed the units in that quote because the symbol for ppt is a percent sign with two little italicized zeros after it and it doesn't copy and paste correctly. I also added the SG conversion for clarity).

It's important to note here that while the Moreton Bay strain is the 'cold water variant', they cultured them just fine at normal reef temperatures, so it would be wishful thinking to suggest that that strain hasn't entered the trade. Given the epidemiological soup that is the global fish supply chain, any one fish that makes it to a hobbyist's tank could be carrying multiple strains of ich from multiple parts of the world.

And finally:
Apolinario, V. Y., Yen-Ling S., Hung-Hung, S. 2003. Characterization of Cryptocaryon irritans, a parasite isolated from marine fishes in Taiwan. Diseases of Aquatic Organisms.

I've already typed too much so I'll just sum up the main points:
They cultured C. irritans successfully over many generations at the following salinities: 5ppt (1.004 SG), 10ppt (1.008 SG), and 35ppt (1.026)
The 5 ppt variant came from a near fresh water pond, the 10ppt variant came from cage raised brackish fish, and were 12th generation tomonts raised at that salinity, and the normal salinity variants came from wild, cage raised, and aquarium fish.

They go in to way more detail about the genetics and morphology of each of the variants, but the gist was that C. irritans is way, way more variable than previously known, with a much wider array of adaptations than previously thought. The super low salinity variant was also highly pathological:

"The occurrence of cryptocaryoniasis in inland sea bream ponds in Chiayi with a salinity of 5 ppt resulted in daily mortality of the cultured fish (about 20 dead fish d–1, each weighing ca. 300 g)."

and finally:

"The successful adaptation and continuous propagation of the Kaoshiung isolate at 10 ppt further attests to the need for immediate attention to out- breaks of the parasite at low salinity. It suggests that C. irritans is capable of adapting successfully to lower salinities and thus of causing damage over a wider salinity range, including brackishwater."

There are obviously way more papers about crypt out there, but those are the most relevant to hypo as a method. To summarize, the hypo method that's been developed in the forums is not a method that any of the people who's careers are made on this stuff have ever tested, and the one hypo protocol that is 'scientist approved' is never practiced by home aquarists as far as I can tell. Also, the hypo method that was tested was invented before most of what we know about ich's intraspecific variation was discovered, using a single variant of ich from one specific part of the world, and that likely had a naturally lower tolerance to low salinity.

So, the moral of the story is that it might work for you. Or it might not. It's worked for some, and it's not worked for others, and there's strong evidence to suggest that for some of the people it fails for, there's something more than them not sticking to the method properly going on. Like most things, there's no magic bullet (or magic salinity, in this case). You might have a strain that has a narrower halo-tolerance than your fish, or you might not. You will only find out if it works for you if you try, but when you're talking about completely nuking a mature system, I don't know if I would take that risk, but that's just me.

There is a 4th method that was suggested by Colorni that I will finish this post with, as maybe it's something you'd be willing to try. Again, it's highly, highly labour intensive, and for maximum effect I would likely re-do my rock work so that there weren't any places I couldn't reach, and I'd remove my sand bed. It has the added benefit of treating your whole system so you wouldn't need to fallow it for months, and is potentially over in 12 days. Logistically however, it seems difficult. You'd want to pay special attention to areas that you know your fish sleep, as that's likely where the tomonts will be:

"... a 1-2cm layer of fine sand is spread uniformly over the bottom of the treatment aquarium. Three days later, the sand is removed by suction and a new layer is deposited. This operation must be repeated four times at 3 day intervals. This treatment offers the protomont a substratum suitable for encystment, yet which is easily removable. The method is practical in aquaria in which fishes co-exist with sponges, corals and other delicate sessile invertebrates that cannot survive any drastic handling."

[Mike-fish]

Just a quick update. The herbtana seems to be helping so I will continue using it.

[howdy20012002]

that is great news
good luck with it.