I would second the hyposalinity route. I currently have my fish in QT tank because of ich and I am leaving my DT fallow for 10 weeks to make sure the little bastards are well and truly gone. The fish are doing really well, eating like its going out of style and in great condition. It's been really easy to maintain so far as well with water changes every second day with ro/di water made up to 1.009 salinity.

Sent from my HTC Incredible S using Tapatalk 2

Im going through the exact same thing now due to negligence on my part with new additions. i lost a foxface to it but all 7 other fish are doing great right now at 1.009. Eating like pigs.

Why the water changes every 2nd day though? are you having nitrate or ammonia problems in the QT?

I started off doing water changes frequently in order to get the salinity down to 1.009 then once at the correct level I slowed down with the water changes. At the moment I do one about every 3/4 days. It isn't a very big tank and there are 5 fish in it so just want to be safe. I read an article saying that you should do a partial water change every couple of days so that was kind of the route I was following.

Either way it is working so.can't complain.

Sent from my HTC Incredible S using Tapatalk 2

Once I had my water down to 1.009 (the magic number), I never changed it again, until I was raising it back up. For that, I used display tank water (from water changes) to get it back up. The advantage was that the new fish were fully acclimated to my DT (their ultimate destination) water when they were ready to be moved.

Of course, I checked water params in the QT the whole time. And be sure to use an accurate refractometer. Those swing arm hydrometers are totally inadequate for this purpose.

cool. I dosed with prodibio startup and put an ammonia badge in the 55g tank. along with small pieces of LR and ceramic rings filter media. im becoming more and more a believer in hyposalinity =)

I have nothing against hyposalinity, my only worry was when I read somewhere that the pH was hard to keep at a stable level when treating by hyposalinity method. What are you guys doing to maintain your pH levels? I don't mind the long 6-10 week waiting at all, only thing steering me away was how much work it would be to stay on top of pH levels

I dose for calc/alk via two part dosing method so all I use the solution for alkalinity. Only takes about 5 ml to treat 20gal of rodi water. A little bit goes a long way. I use the brs powder but don't remember exactly which one. I have read that regular baking soda works as well but you might want another opinion on that

Have never adjusted any of my water when doing hypo, and fish were always happy. My QT is running all the time (also use it for coral frag QT) using a canister filter, and water from my display tank after water changes. So it is always in a mature and stable state. I think people get into trouble with their QTs when they are hastily set up, and don't have stable params to start with.

I have never had any problem maintaining the tank in hyposalinity.
like mentioned, the most important aspect is having a stable system to begin with.

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.