Its that damm ich again..

Hi

Thought anyone battling with whitespot/ich in thier tank may find my experience usefull. Would be think that maybe it helped someone.

I've had tropical freshwater fish for years and a few onths ago made the change to marines.

I have a 100 liter tank with Internal power filter, 15KG + of live rock, 9KG of live sand, air driven tripple pass skimmer and 2x 22" HO T5 lights.

Everything went great until I purchased a coral beauty who came with a BAD case of ich.

I followed the advice of the lfs and within a few days promptly lost him and all my other fish (two clown fish, yellow tailed damsel). The lfs advised I use oodinex, which did absolutely nothing at all.

I was gutted and thought about going back to freshwater tropicals.

In the end I persisted with Marines and emptied my tank, cleaned with boiling water and weak bleach (incliding filters and heater etc). I threw all the sand away and replaced with propper live sand.

I scrubbed my live rock and soaked it in scalding water and re-set up the tank. I also purchased another 4kg of cured rock as my old rock was now completely sterile (after a month my old rock has been re-seeded by the new stuff and was sprouting algea and all sorts).

Everthing went great, and new fish were introduced only after a seachem paraguard bath for a good few hours before going in the tank.

After a few weeks it was looking nice again, water parameters looked great too, no trace of ich or any other undesirable anywhere.

Then I went out and purchased a few more snails and introduced them to the tank. They all got a freshwater rinse before going in and I tought all would be fine.

3 days later what do i see.. whitespots on the fish again.. arggghhh!

I have nowhere to set up a quarentine tank, and with small kids around even a bucket on the floor is out of the question.

So the question is, how do I treat this in the tank and not lose any fish this time or harm any inverts?

After much reading of all the differing opinions I have seen I set upon a course of action and here's how I seem to have beaten Ich..in my display tank.... with out copper or quarentine.

Step 1) step up the water changes.. 10% 3 times a week did it for me.

Stem 2) install a UV unit. I bought one for £23 from Ebay, it was a 9w that had its own pump etc, it just looks like a power filter. I restricted the flow down to about 400 Lph, whch gave a throughput of just under 10 GPH per watt (the reported magic number to kill parasites).

Step 3) Every morning I'd turn the skimmer and UV off and do a 1/4 dose of Seachem Paraguard. Any higher and it seemed to stun the snails, starfish and crabs. Pretty sure 1/2 dose would have started to kill stuff!

After 30 minutes I'd turn the skimmer and UV back on.

Now two weeks later and thers no whitespot to be seen anywhere.

The only downside is the small amunt of heat the UV seems to put into the water. It adds about 2c to my tank temperature.

In the eveining I have some of those blue plastic block you put in the freezer which get put in the tank to try and keep it n higher that 26C->27C

Hope that helps someone out there, all the best..

Mark

 

Seems like some good info. Do you mind listing the types of fish you had in both scenerios, as that would be important to know if you had really hardy fish or delicate ones?

Glad you got it worked out, I can only imagine thats frustrating especially after giving the snails a freshwater bath (how long?).

 

Pretty hardcore way to battle ich. Glad it worked out for you!

 

The initial stocking was a yellow tailed blue damsel, 2 precula clown fish (or nemo fish as my daughter called them ;D ), a selection of turbo snails and nerite snails, a pepermint shrimp and a cleaner shrimp and two red legged hermit crabs.

I lost all the fish to ich and before I put the inverts in the rebuilt tank I gave them a soak in a 1/2 dose of seahem paraguard for a hour just to make sure the was no possibility of transporting ich in the water on the net or similar.

Maybe they were already weakened by the moves, i dont know. What I do know is that over the next week all the inverts died.

So, with no fish and no inverts it made sense to just blitz the tank rather than wait 8 weeks.

When ich showed up a second time I had 3 yellow tailed blue damsels, 2 percula clown fish and a yellow watchman goby, plus a similar mix of inverts as last time.

I also now have some sun coral and assorted zoa and on 1/4 dose of paraguard they would retract and sulk for several hours.

I deffinately wouldn't dose more than 1/4 strength paraguard or leave it in for more than a hour, it seems like strong stuff.

when I added the snails that caused the second outbreak it was more of a 1 minute freshwater rinse than a bath, just enough to minimise the bag water going into the main tank via the snails themselves.

 

Welcome to 3reef,

Very frustrating, but you are enduring one of the most maddening things about SW.

I did not see in your post what you are feeding. It's almost impossible to keep a marine tank ich free, unless you do strict quarantine. This is the reason that a good diet and as little stress as possible is important to prevent the opportunistic parasite from gaining a foot hold.

Keep up the good fight.

 

Food is a mixture of flake food and frozen brine shrimp.

Any sugestions of alernatives that I could vary thier diet with?

 

I've had good luck with marine cuisine frozen cubes supplemented with garlic as well as marine one pellets w/ garlic. I add a little bit of seaweed mix and frozen squid from time to time but only sparringly since they don't seem to enjoy those as much. From what I can gather, the best thing for ich is a strong diet to keep their immune system at peak performance. Keeping stress to a minimum is key from what I can tell. Of course, my experience is miniscule compared to others here so I'd be apt to follow their suggestions before my own