ick problem cured!

[sapphire]

*BOUNCINGS The ick problem in the 46 gallon tank seems to be cured......I treated with Rid Ick Plus and raised the temp and did loads of water changes. The last fish that was ill and staying in one corner is now swimming happily. I did a 7 day treatment and hopefully all will be okay now. Will be watching carefully.
Now I am transferring some of the babies from the 5 gallon tank in with the others.

 

[SANND]

that's awesome sapphire if it were me, I'd wait another week or so before putting the fry in but i don't know if it's necessary. I'm sure someone else with more experience will come along soon and let you know.

 

[sapphire]

actually I added a few today and a couple the other day and they are fine but I am going to wait until the middle of the week to add more. So far, so good

 

[valleyvampiress]

Ich treatment should stop 7 days after the last time you saw white grains. This is because the only way the ich parasites are vulnerable is in their free swimming stage when they are looking for a host. When they are white grains on the fish, they are protected with a crust (the white grain). It can be possible for it to be gone in less than that, but why take the chance? If ich is properly treated the first time, you will never get it again, unless of course you reinfect the tank with a contaminent from another infected tank (ie. fish, ornament, gravel etc.).

 

[NEM]

i've heard that before, that once you rid a tank of ick it won't come back unless you re-introduce it somehow.

just curious, how is then that 'stress' or water temperature changes can cause ick out of the blue. i'm confused.

thanks!

 

[dss2004]

The basic principle was always that ich was in your water in one form or another. However we now know that through quarantining new fish and keeping the water pristine you will rarely (if ever) have problems with ich in your show tank.

Just keep up what you are doing and you won't have to worry about fighting ich anymore.

Always use a q-tank.

 

[valleyvampiress]

i've heard that before, that once you rid a tank of ick it won't come back unless you re-introduce it somehow.

just curious, how is then that 'stress' or water temperature changes can cause ick out of the blue. i'm confused.

thanks!

When a fish is stressed, he/she is more suceptible to becoming sick because its immune system is weakened. A fish can be stressed by things such as drastic water temp changes, temps not within their living peramterers, high amounts of ammonia/nitrite/nitrate, and things of the like.

The reason ich can seem to appear out of nowhere is because the parasites may not be able to attack a healthy fish. When a fish becomes stressed, they are more likely to get sick as I said earlier. This means that ich has already been in the tank in question, it just wasn't able to infect the fish either at all or to not able to infect to an extreme degree.

As already stated by dss2004, ich is not in every tank, only the infected ones which became infected from an infected tank (sorry if that's confusing, heh). Another myth is that ich can remain dormant. This is not true. Ich is always looking for a host, infecting the host, and/or reproducing. It just may not seem apperent until it becomes an outburst of reproducing parasites. Ich could be almost eliminated from treatment, but may still have a few parasites who survived because they weren't caught in their free swimming stage. This can cause a tank to become become reinfected, or more accurately, drastically repopulated with the parasite (I believe for every one ich parasite, it can produce 200).

This is why it's important to make sure that when you're treating ich, you do it for longer than what is needed so that there's no chance that you missed a few. Some people do it for one week after all the crust has fallen off (becuase they need to be caught in their free swimming stage), to two weeks (which is obviously overkill, but some people want to be absolutely, 100% sure it's gone).

I hope this answers your question. I know I was kind of all over the place.