One seriously sick thought

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confused1

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Jul 15, 2010
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OK. I picked up some plants from my LFS over two months ago. Long story short it caused an outbreak of ich in my tank that I have not been able to get rid of. I know some people like to say that ich lives in all tanks at all times. My personal experience leads me to believe otherwise. It may live in SOME tanks all of the time.... but as a scientist it takes a lot to get me to buy a statement that close to an absolute. I do know this, the timing of the outbreak indicates that they were brought in on the plants. And despite everything that has been done to treat it, it is still infecting my fish. I am not going to bore you with the long list of methods I have tried, except to say that it is extensive.

I don't want to debate if ich are there all of the time or not. I have done some microscopy to answer that question for myself, and my results lead me to doubt the statement even more. Until I see evidence that the statement is true, I don't buy it.

Prelude to my sick thought. Today I decided to move out of the realm of anectodal reports and into the peer reviewed journals for an answer to my ich problem. The first couple articles I read brought up a very interesting point. Ich research has been inhibited by the near inability to cryopreserve the creature (Ichthyophthirius multifilis). In normal people terms - you can't freeze it. You can't dry out the cysts and bring them back either. So keeping them around for experiments is difficult.

O and by the way, for those who think that freshwater ICH can go dormant for long periods outside of the fish, it's not true. They are obligate parasites. If they had a dormant (fishless) phase then researchers would simply store them in that phase, the papers indicate that they have tried this already.

I have read reports that you can freeze some types of fish with liquid nitrogen and bring them back. And freezing the contents of an empty tank is no big deal. This leads to my sick thought. Can I wipe this disease out of my tank through freezing?

Yeah, I know it is a cruel sick thought, but daily water changes for close to two months and watching helplessly as the fish suffer and die one at a time will drive one to sick thoughts. Any thoughts on the freezing idea??? Even as a way to decon a tank that the fish have been removed from?
 
Bleach will kill the ich, but it will also kill the biofilter.

Freezing your tank with out your fish in it won't help though if your fish have ich. Once you put the fish back in, you will have ich again. (Same is true of bleach).

You would almost have to repeat this freezing process every 24 hours for 7-10 days for it to work.
 
I have tried the formalin/malachite green route. I don't think I ran that course long enough (10 days), but I was losing too many fish to it. My rainbows appear to be pretty sensitive to the chemicals.

Next was Kordon's rid ich - which was totally useless. It did not seem to stress either the fish or the parasite (about 20 days, including combining it with the treatment to follow). So I tried the high temp and salt routine (temp limited by equipment to 86 degrees). This kept the amount of ich quite low (by far the most effective yet), but the problem was only getting worse (and I was doing vacuum water changes every other day).

So I decided to go with a modified method this time. I removed all of the fish from the tank and placed them in a non-filtered small holding tank with no substrate. I vacuumed the show tank thoroughly and kept it at 82 degrees with everything running - fishless.

As to the holding tank, I cleaned all the inner surfaces and did as close to a total water change as I could get without leaving the fish flopping in the bottom of the tank (90-95%) every day for 10 days. I have been varying the food to help them cope and try to maintain an innume system. I have lost three fish to the stress so far.

There have not been any visible signs of ich for at least 4 days now. I even did a microscopic exam of the gills of the last one that died (this morning) and it looked clean (which does not say a whole lot because during the time frame between the first 6 hours and the second day trophonts are invisible in the gills). I upped the salt in the holding tank since the celebes are more of a brackish species, it seems to be helping the remaining two some. I have been keeping the lights in that room low and there is no light on the tank. They freak when the normal lighting is turned on. The threadfins are not showing much color, or flirting with each other, but they don't appear nearly as stressed as the Celebes. They are frazzeled as hell, and their fins look awful.

Since there are no fish in the main tank, it should be clear. I want to vacuum it one more time and change the filter media before reintroducing the fish (Part of me wants to do this tomorrow). I just hope it has been long enough to work. I read one journal article and their strain took 5 days to pass through the trophont stage in channel cats. The other studies I have looked at said they can take from 2 days to 10 days in the tomite stage. All stages are affected by temperature from what I have been reading. FYI most studies only focus on one aspect of a particular stage so it's hard to piece it all together.

I have two more Celebes (my last two) that are on the verge of dropping from the stress (hence the hurry to return them to the show tank). These are very shy fish, so this is really hard on them. The flip side is that the other species (threadfin rainbows) are very susceptible to the Ich (hence the hesitancy to hurry). I can't make heads or tails of the pleco's responses - other than they miss their driftwood and caves. So they are no pressure either way.

Now you see why I skipped this part of the narrative in my original post - as well as how I got that frustrated. O and by the way the city water here is so bad I have to use RO water on my tank - so high volume water changes eat up the majority of my after noon/evening between babysitting the filter and actually doing the water change. That's why the holding tank is small.
 
Have you considered the three-tank method? You have three aquariums and leave all the fish in tank one for a day. Then move them all to tank two and nuke, scrub and dry tank one to remove all ich. Then move them all to tank three the next day and clean tank two. Next day, back to tank one. Keep that up and within about ten days you'll have no adults left alive to produce eggs and the subsequent trophonts.
 
I know you have tried it, but I have had the best results using the high temp and salt method for a few weeks. I dont know how long you did it for, but always go longer than you think you need to.
 
Knifegill I had not heard or thought of that. I like it, I just don't know if they can handle that. Especially at this point. They went straight from high temp to the holding tank. The Ich had started to really multiply even at the high temp with salt so I had to try something else. I have been removing the heater and stone and scrubbing them down daily, its not as good as the three tank, but I am hoping it has been good enough. I am more worried that the main tank needs a couple more days to for sure be clear than I am of the fish still having them.
 
Damn, I have never heard of ICH being this hard to kill before.

I like the 3 tank concept, never hear of that. Is that a Knifegill original? Its got a LOT of merit to it.
 
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