Your thoughts on "Ich-Free" tanks - IS IT POSSIBLE?

[NastayNatron]

Ich can be dormant on rock longer than 1 week. . . thats why you have to keep a tank fallow for 6-8 weeks to be sure all the ich dies before adding fish back in if you go through treatment. Like I said I have treated ALL fish with cupramine and took all precautions necessary to prevent ich. The only thing I did not do is quarantine coral. I dipped all coral in revive but am not about to set up another tank for coral quarantine. Maybe I got unlucky and it managed to come in on coral .

Either way I have decided that for the duration of this tank I am going to try the method of keeping the fish healthy in quarantine while feeding garlic and training them on different kinds of food. It would be pointless to treat with hypo or copper as it appears my tank already has ich in it.(I do not have an outbreak, just a couple spots on blue tang). The point of the quarantine will be to make sure something like velvet isn't introduced into the display. I am already planning an upgrade(aren't we all) in 3 or 4 years to a bigger tank with a fish room. If my experience with ich in these years leading up to the upgrade leads me to believe keeping it out of the tank is possible and the best route to go, I will put a strict coral quarantine into my new tank build.

I am deciding to try this for myself because I just got my system up and running and am starting to enjoy it. I do not want to tear the tank apart catching all the fish to treat them for ich at this stage. I would probably stress them half to death and do not have a qt big enough for them all. Thanks for all the insight. This is clearly a very debated topic in the hobby!

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

It's the fish that need to be qt for 6 to 8 weeks, not the corals, because of the life cycle. If you read the article on that link that was just posted by sphelps, it explains it pretty well.

With corals, you dip them in Revive (or something similar), and have a separate QT for them, with no fish, for a week or so, before adding them to the DT. I haven't bought any new corals for a while, so haven't done this myself, but that is the best practice as I understand it. I am sure there are others on this forum, that could tell you more about that.