Heat and salt doing nothing for ich
- Thread starter FSM
- Start date
There are alot of diseases that look like ick. And true ick does not commonly kill a fish. But it can stress the fish to the point where other bacterial infections can take hold. If you are sure it is ick. Then treat the fish with a ick medication at half to 3/4 strength. If there is a chance that it may not be ick that is killing them. Then i would recommend treating them with jungle labs fungus clear tabs.. These treat all common fungus problems and have antibiotics in them to treat any secondary infection. I would also carry on with the salt treatment as well. Also the jungle labs should not interfer with your bio-filter in a mature tank.------good luck
That sucks man. Yeah I struggled keeping that crap off my bottom dwellers as well. After losing 2 small plecos, I finally gave up trying to medicate it and just removed/quarantined the fish, drained the water down the the gravel, flipped the gravel completely and sucked all the crud out, took all the decor out, boiled it, then filled the tank up with fresh clean water. Only way to be sure....lol
That's a pretty good link, but it doesn't mention the three tank method. No meds or high temps. You just tank three small tanks and move the fish from one to the next every three days, into brand new water. Feed lightly to avoid ammonia extremes. The parasites are unable to complete their life cycle and the problem is cured rather quickly. I thihk it was on Wet Web Media. I can't seem to find it now...
hybridtheoryd16;3125917; said:
It looks like they are finally improving. I have 4 remaing, 2 of which are about 5 inches each and never had it very bad. There is another very small one, about 1.5 inches, and the last loach is about 2-3 inches. The smaller ones had it worst, but there are a lot less spots on the body now, but gill movement is still rapid. I was about to put them in a smaller tank and treat with quick cure, but I think that would just stress them more, and I am pretty confident they will recover if I leave them alone.
I'm going to siphon out a lot of the sand while doing a waterchange to hopefully remove as many of the cysts as possible.
knifegill;3126135; said:
that's a really good idea. Definitely worth a try I think. You would need to clean out each tank after it was used though, and adding salt would probably still be helpful.
I just lost two pacus to ich and some type of fungus.
I just cleaned up my Oscars. They had ich real bad and started getting fin rot so I raised the temp to 90(Slowly and they seemed to love it) used salt, quickcure, and melafix and they were ich free in only 2 days and are now active and eating. It has been 6 days since I started treatment and the temp is now at a constant 86 degrees.
That worked for me so maybe you should try it.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot to mention I had been gravel vac and doing 25% w/c in the morning and 25% w/c in the afternoon everyday for the first four days.
I just cleaned up my Oscars. They had ich real bad and started getting fin rot so I raised the temp to 90(Slowly and they seemed to love it) used salt, quickcure, and melafix and they were ich free in only 2 days and are now active and eating. It has been 6 days since I started treatment and the temp is now at a constant 86 degrees.
That worked for me so maybe you should try it.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot to mention I had been gravel vac and doing 25% w/c in the morning and 25% w/c in the afternoon everyday for the first four days.
I am not so confident in the disease curing abilities of salt. It is hard to know if it is actually the heat that helps, or just the fish recovering by itself. When the ich outbreak first started, the loaches got it first, then silver dollars (they recovered quickly) and the fish in the tank with scales still don't have it.
FSM;3126481; said:
I don't believe salt cures anything either but I do feel that a little bit of salt helps with stress.