Blue Hippo - Ich - Treating with copper

[daniella3d]

You might want to rethink this and do a hyposalinity instead and put some liverock in there. I am doing it with a hippo with ich and my liverock bacterias survived the hyposalinity and I have zero problem with ammonia.

I keep my salinity between 1.010 to 1.009 and he's been in there with a clownfish in a 20 gallons for 3 weeks and no more sign of ich. One more week to go and I slow raise the salinity back to 1.024 over the course of 7 days and voila. I did this because I did not want to have to deal with ammonia rising all the time and loads of water change. Plus with hyposalinity it is easy to do water change since it only require a little bit of salt to reach 1.009.

But if you would change the treatment and go to hyposalinity then you would have to change all the water because you cannot combine hypo with copper, it woudl be toxic. You would also have to adjust the fish to the new salinity over a few days. It is easier on the fish to lower the salinity than to raise it, so dropping it can be done in one day but raising it must be done slowly like 0.002 per day. A refractometer is necessary because this need accuracy that a hygrometer cannot provide.

Originally Posted by scherzo

I have a Hippo Tang in a 15 gallon (It is a juvenile) and am treating it with copper. (It had ich).

Since I setup the tank a week ago ammonia is now going up.

How should I handle the water changes and re-dose the copper?

I think I'm about .25ppm for ammonia.

Should I just measure the amount I'm taking out and then re-dose?

I do have a copper test kit but I know that it is sometimes difficult to calculate dosage of the copper using a test kit. Maybe test 1st to get a baseline?

Anyone with experience?

Thanks