Garlic

That site is pretty accurate to most of what I've come to understand. The one thing that I'm not so sure about is the mention of eels, sharks and rays, though. I've read in numerous other places that sharks and rays are highly resistant to ich, as they are not bony fish, but cartilaginous fish. The article mentions they are categorized with bony fish as well, so this is likely a slip by the author.

This is the series of articles I've really looked through the most.

 

I just lost my normal clown last night to a bout of ich. My misbar is perfectly fine, though he had a few spots last week. I took some Garlic Rx and squirted it directly at his face, which he went absolutely NUTS over, and the ich went away after 3 days of this. He didn't really want to eat during this time, mind you. Last night, I noticed my normal clown had a spot on his pectoral fin and would not take the garlic treatment like how the misbar did. The misbar knows what the pipette is and came over to get more garlic when I placed it in the tank for the normal. The normal clown was right next to his anemone when I saw him this morning, sigh.
Anyhow, that's my experience with garlic extract and fish.

 

I've lost a few hundred dollars of fish to ich in the past trying to ride it out. Learned the hard way to always quarantine. I'll go with hypo if I ever have to deal with it in the main tank again. Hopefully it won't happen. My corals are frags on small pieces of rock so it's easy to remove them if need be.

 

Garlic has been proven to boost the immune system not just to increase appitite in fish. I had this discussion last year on this forum and have raised many scientific studies on this. Although the topic was not in relation to white spot but what effect A. sativum had on fish.

I have always found providing good water quality, plus quality foods (this includes garlic soaked foods) (small amounts 2-3 times a day) and a cleaner shrimp the best cure for a light infestation. Most fish will become immune for 6 months after recovering from white spot.

 

I by far am no expert (yet) but I am in my last week of hyposalinity which is the 6th week. I am going to start to bring my water back up to tomorrow very slowly back to normal salinity range.Within about a week after we drop the salinity ick was gone. But this is not for reef systems and will kill all coral and some inverts. I lost alot of my clean up crew but some are still kicking and happy as ever.

 

I can say that garlic doesn't work, definitively.

I had 7 of my 8 fish die in the past week due to an ich outbreak; the outbreak happened while I was using Garlic Xtreme with the food for the past month.

I was lowering the salinity of a hospital tank; it was around 1.017 (brought down over about 6 days from 1.025) when the first fish died. The fish all ate well before I used the garlic, so it didn't improve anything in that regard.

The tank had nitrates of 7.5, and they were fed with various H2O Life frozen foods; no flakes or pellets. The fish were all very healthy until I got a tang which brought ich in with it; the tang was even very healthy except for the couple spots.

Other than not getting the HT set up sooner, and maybe not lowering the SG fast enough or not using copper, there's not a single thing that can be labeled as "done wrong" with my HT setup other than "placed too much faith in garlic (aka snake oil)".

 

I think you have misunderstood what garlic effect on fish is, it will not 'cure' whitespot, it will boost the immune system and help the fish recover. Generally fish will fight off whitespot and only really effects fish when they become stressed. If they are badly affected by whitespot then moving them to a new environment and lowering salinity or using copper treatments can cause too much stress and IME will kill them. It is usually a better option for a badly affected fish to just provide stable and good water parameters, make sure they get nutritous and varied foods, and add cleaner shrimp. There have been scientific studies on fish fed garlic and it has been proven to improve the immune system, which means your statement of garlic does not work definitively is false, unless you had a faulty batch or added too much (adding too much can have a negative effect on the fish and cause internal damage). In a lot of cases after a fish has had whitespot it will be immune for 6 months and IMO with cleaner gobies and/or cleaner shrimp is enough time for them to remove the parasite from a system.

 

How much is too much? I use fresh garlic, not a garlic extract, is there a way to know how much is the right amount?

 

High levels above about 1-2% garlic has an effect on the liver of the fish. Seems from the research I have read 0.5-1% garlics seems more appropriate and beneficial to avoid toxicity to the fish. Also if the fish isn't ill there is no need to add garlic.

During the test, where they produced a fish feed which was dry and weighed and added 0.5-1% garlic.

source; http://www.oceandocs.org/bitstream/1834/1478/1/garlicpaper2.pdf

Source; http://ajol.info/index.php/ejb/article/view/29978/0

For an extract that was bought for a reef tank, I would just follow the directions the supplier provided with the product. As it is an extract and is likely to be much more concentrated than ground garlic used in the test.

 

Although there was one paper that stated that 3% garlic was good for fish.

Source; http://www.scielo.br/pdf/jvatitd/v12n2/v12n2a03.pdf