IM starting to get pissed off. I got ick a few weeks ago and started treatment by raising the temp and adding salt (my tank is normally conditioned with aquarium salt to a level of 1 tablespoon per five gallons any way, so i only added a few more tablespoons to my fifty five gallon however i raised the temp from the mid 70's into the early 80's. After about four days of these temps i saw no improvement so i did a fifty percent water change adding a tablespoon of salt / 5 gallons of water changed, and then treated with wardley ick away. i followed directions on the bottle treating one day and two days later doing a fifty percent water change and retreating for three treatments. It seemed to work, the white spots on the fish all disappeared and i no loner saw the whit "fluff" floating through the tank . However a few days after the last treatment of ick away my fish are again rubbing there bodies against the ornaments of the tank, and acting kinda fishy... (pardon the pun) ... How could ick recurr?
RECURRING ICK
- Thread starter Hdeuce
- Start date
There is a life stage of ich that is impervious to medications, etc. You have to treat all the way through the life cycle of ick.
You were not completing the treatment course by 14 days minimum which is strictly required to eliminate all pathogens.
If the treatment was done for 10-14 days minimum, yes, it can prevent recurrence as the whole treatment process destroys almost all the pathogens but cutting the treatment short will not help. Do remember that ich is very vulnerable only at the stage when it is free-swimming, not while under the epidermis of the fish nor the cysts encrusted on decors. Heat can help increase speed of life cycle thus allowing the meds or salt to destroy the ich, assuming you never added salt during water changes which could produce salt-resistant strains of ich.Hdeuce;2167181; said:
I will add that in the middle of the treatment process, ich will seem to worsen as more parasites are produced due to heat but the number of parasites will gradually diminish in the next few days.
I had this problem in my Angel tank and after an exhausting 21 days of treatment I finally got rid of it and it hasn't returned. My advice is just to keep up the treatment with frequent water changes.