Plans to rid ich, need advice

[asylumdown]

Well, Hypo is finally working, but my lost fish list from the first couple of days is depressing:

Powder blue tang
Cleaner wrasse
labouti wrasse
1 Bengali cardinal (the odd one out, the breeding pair made it)

and both of my firefish, though not from ich, one jumped over the dividing baffle between the low salinity chamber and the normal salinity display when I was doing a water change, I assume his kidneys exploded. The other one vanished yesterday for unknown reasons.

Everyone else is now spot free, eating and behaving normally. It's entirely possible that moving them to the QT system and lowering the salinity pushed already stressed fish over the edge, but by the looks of how bad it got in the first 48 hours after they went in to hypo, I would say I was probably on track to lose everything if I hadn't gotten them out when I did. I read an article that said C. Irritans can increase it's population by 10 times in a week in a closed system, so if there's a stressed fish spouting off tomites by the dozen, the population of theronts can quickly increase to levels that will overwhelm even resistant and healthy fish. I bet it really comes down to a numbers game.

FW dips rid my fish of the majority of their spots at the beginning, but it was too late for the powder blue. I've never seen anything like that before, it was really awful. The cruel irony is that I think the FW dip (which he seemed to tolerate perfectly well in the hours after he received it) actually killed all the parasites on his body, as the next morning he was spot free, but he was also barely breathing and getting blown about by the current either upside down or sideways. I can only imagine what that many tissue ruptures at the same time must have done to his body's internal chemistry.

My biggest problem now is controlling the cycle that's resulted from putting them all in there. I'm doing 30% daily water changes and dosing copious amounts of aqua vitro Alpha, along with a boat load of Stability every day. No one has shown any signs of ammonia poisoning, but yesterday I started detecting nitrites so I'm a little worried.

Once I'm done with the hypo cycle (28 more days to go!), I'm going to spend 3 or 4 days bringing it back up to normal sea water, then initiate a 3 week daily dosing of Seachem paraguard. Seachem assured me in their forum that all of the ingredients break down after about 24 hours in salt water so I don't have to worry about anything leaching back in to my system from the rocks. Once that's done, there will be a two week 'cool down' period of heavy carbon filtering before I return them to the main display.

I know there are ways to control ich in a system through good nutrition and appropriate husbandry, but if you ask me it's a ticking time bomb. After this, there won't be a single fish added to my system who doesn't first get a fresh water dip, then a 3 week treatment of either paraguard or cupramine, then another 2 weeks for observation.

[gregzz4]

Besides your losses ... glad to hear it's going well
Sounds like you have a good plan and you should do just fine

Don't forget that you can use things like Ammo Lock or AmGuard if you have a serious issue
Then you can do a WC without freaking out

Don't fret the nitrites you are seeing. Just keep more than one foam in the filter and only rinse them ( one per session ) in old tank water ... unless they become so plugged you have to toss them

What I do in my 20g QT ( Aquaclear 50 ) is rinse the bottom foam and exchange it with the top one
You can do either/or and keep rotating them without losing beneficial bacteria

Keep us updated

[asylumdown]

For posterity's sake, I'll just update this and mention that the hypo didn't work. Or at least my hypo set-up didn't work. After 5 weeks in hypo, and 1.5 weeks in hypo plus paraguard, the purple tang got ich again. I think water from the main display got in to the QT system at some point, and the salinity bumped up a bit.

Fish are all now in the garage getting treated with cupramine.

[sphelps]

With hypo treatments it's my understanding you need a minimum of 4 weeks with no spots then another four weeks with increased salinity to verify the fish is cured. That means holding the fish in hypo for an additional 4 weeks after all ich has disappeared and then another 4 weeks to verify so it's probably minimum 9 week treatment if the fish has ich.

[asylumdown]

yep, that's correct, What I'm saying is that after they had been in hypo for almost 6 weeks (I was extending the hypo period longer so that I could also dose Paraguard in conjunction with hypo at the end), they got ich again. The tang developed spots of ich out of the blue while the salinity was still down in the 1.010 range, after not having had any at all since a few days after the hypo treatment began. So either there was contamination from the DT, which hadn't been fallowed long enough, or the ich had stuck around in the QT system for all that time even with a hypo conditions and the addition of paraguard, or both.

In either case, for me it failed, but there are a bunch of reasons why that could have happened and is not necessarily a problem with the method per se. However, the more reading I do on the interwebs about it, the less I think it's a method that can truly eradicate the parasite for good.

[sphelps]

It's definitely more finicky and not something I would peruse for that reason, 1.010 is too high I think as well, has to be 1.008-1.009 and you'll need something to measure that and be accurate as well which is hard in that range. If the fish are healthy the cupramine is a better option anyway IMO.

[daniella3d]

Your QT was connected to the main tank? how can water from the main tank get into the QT? that should not happen because it will recontaminate the QT and thus the fish. Same way if you put your hands in the main tank and then back into the QT you run the risk of contaminating the fish again.

Hyposalinity work but it must be constantly at 1.009, and if your instrument is out of wack, only one degree can make a difference.

I used hypo a few times and it always worked for me at 100%.

It is imperative to monitor the tank for evaporation so that salinity does not goes yo yo and rise over 1.010.

Originally Posted by asylumdown

yep, that's correct, What I'm saying is that after they had been in hypo for almost 6 weeks (I was extending the hypo period longer so that I could also dose Paraguard in conjunction with hypo at the end), they got ich again. The tang developed spots of ich out of the blue while the salinity was still down in the 1.010 range, after not having had any at all since a few days after the hypo treatment began. So either there was contamination from the DT, which hadn't been fallowed long enough, or the ich had stuck around in the QT system for all that time even with a hypo conditions and the addition of paraguard, or both.

In either case, for me it failed, but there are a bunch of reasons why that could have happened and is not necessarily a problem with the method per se. However, the more reading I do on the interwebs about it, the less I think it's a method that can truly eradicate the parasite for good.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by daniella3d

Your QT was connected to the main tank? how can water from the main tank get into the QT? that should not happen because it will recontaminate the QT and thus the fish. Same way if you put your hands in the main tank and then back into the QT you run the risk of contaminating the fish again.

Hyposalinity work but it must be constantly at 1.009, and if your instrument is out of wack, only one degree can make a difference.

I used hypo a few times and it always worked for me at 100%.

It is imperative to monitor the tank for evaporation so that salinity does not goes yo yo and rise over 1.010.

My Hypo QT system was in my sump. The plumbing under my tank has a massive two way valve on it. When it's turned one way, water enters the skimmer chamber and flows through all 5 chambers of the sump. When I turn it the other way, it cuts off the flow and drops water right before the bubble trap baffle that's in front of the return chamber. Effectively, turning that one valve isolates 3/4 of my sump from the tank above it. Normally I use that valve do do water changes right in the sump, as the largest chamber in the sump is about 50 gallons, but for the hypo process I had the fish in there.

It was an experiment to see if it would work at all, and in my case it didn't. It was too tricky to keep the salinity maintained perfectly because the ATO system was plumbed in to the return chamber, so I had to add water to the QT system by hand. Also, I'm pretty sure there was some splash back from the DT.

I'm sure there are cases where hypo can work, but I didn't have the right set-up for it. Cupramine is pretty much guaranteed to work, and is way more forgiving on my end, though I recognize it's harder on the fish.