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[Mburke]

Ick is a parasite with three to four stages of life(depends on who you are listening to). The white spot stage on your fish is the adult feeding on your fish. The drop off to the tank bottom and encase themselves(cystic stage I believe) This means your tank has ick. This stage is the reproductive stage in 7-14 days the juvenile emerge(many of them and freely swim about until they find a host(your fish) The cycle begins again. The only way to break the cycle is to have your display remain fishless for 4-6 weeks(no fish at all parasite are in the tank). After 2 years of fighting ick(losing expensive fish,expensive miracle cures(which the expertsBorneman,calfo and all will tell you do not work)I finally went the quarantine route just a small 20 gallon And water from my display tankfor setup(faster cycle time) Traeted all my fish with Cuppramine for 10 days while at the same time lowering salinity in QT.Water changes almost daily for first two weeks. Lowered salinity to 1.090 for the remaining 4 weeks. Then took another two weeks to bring QT back up to normal.The whole time my living room display was empty and at 86 degrees(helps to speed up the ick cycle). Now fish and tank were completely free of ich. I placed two green chromies inthe QT tank just to keep the tank cycled at all times(for that impulse buy at the LFS) and I no longer intrduce anything wet into my display without a 4 week Quaratine.
Yes ick is present inthe ocean but your fish are not inthe ocean in our display tanks things are not diluted by the vastness of the oceans therefore anything which is wild caught has the abiltity to reek havoc on our little systems. The miracle cures will allow your fish to live with ick(stressed) but could you image how terrible your life would be to live with fleas on you ata ll times
Learned my lesson the hard way
Mike