Do parasites need hosts to survive?

Lots of people keep tanks above 80 for long periods of time.

As long as there's no fish in the tank, or there's copper/hyposalinity/formalin in the water, raising the temperature is a good idea. If you're trying to beat it via the "leave the fish in and pray" method, the temp should be lowered.

 

100 degrees if you have no inverts or corals and maybe no live rock? idk i think live rock would be fine

 

As long as my scooter blenny and snails are in there, I could lower the temperature? What would be acceptable to the scooter and snails? 72 degrees? Is pushing 80 degrees too hot for the snails?

 

I was instructed to always avoid copper if you want corals later, as it can soak in the live rock.

 

This is from that article. MI = Marine Ich

"7. MI can live and reproduce in temperatures as low as 50F and as high as 90F. Thus temperatures that would kill MI would first kill or severely stress most tropical marine fishes."

So it would seem raising or lowering temps not a practical solution.

 

copper is a real bastard XD; when in doubt, hypo out lol

 

I'll be staying up on this as you all answer. I recently woke up to my yellow tang, chocolate tang and coral beauty loaded with ich. In the afternoon the ich was almost all gone. Since last week, I've lost 2 mandarins, zebra damsel, the chocolate tang and the goldface sleeper goby. The yellow tang, clown, scooter and diamond goby look fine but my lawnmower has been looking super pale. Not sure if thats normal. Buy yea, i'm just starting to read on ich so I'd love to hear what you all have to say so I can find a way to beat this.

 

Yes, but raising the temperature is something to keep in mind when using a QT or hospital tank.

That's under the assumption that I'm talking about temperature directly killing ich, which I'm not. I'm talking about speeding up its lifecycle to kill it off faster. A change from 74 to 82 would have a significant impact on how long it lives through each of the stages, and thus how long it takes to get into a stage where copper/formalin/hypo would actually be able to affect the parasite.

 

Great read! Will bookmark for sure and solves the mystery about temperature. I think the only thing that can save my royal gramma might be a freshwater dip, but as the article stated, it might not kill all of them.

My royal gramma hasn't eaten in two days, hids all the time, scrapes himself on the sand bottom, and yet has no white marks. It's been about a week with this odd behavior. Do white spots need to be present to be ich?

 

No the white spots do not need be present. Marine Ich spends a lot of its life cycle in the substrate. The fish not eating and scratching are classic signs of Marine Ich.