Hi guys, this is my first time posting here but I've been reading a lot of stuff from here and other forums for months now. I'm a relative newb and have had my tank up and running for about 7 or 8 months now.
I made all the mistakes a newb can make when starting out in the hobby including buying a mandarin for a new tank without a refugium, buying a "small" hippo tang for a Biocube thinking I could get a year out of it and move it to a bigger tank (those things grow so fast), and being completely oblivious to quarantining best practices among many other things.
That said, I've also learned a tremendous amount in that time. The ich life cycle, signs and treatment for flukes, better filtration methods, proper water chemistry for reef tanks, and much much more.
Now, onto my dilemma. I had a bad ich outbreak in October or so last year. I say it was bad, because a neon goby I had bought from LiveAquaria became so overcome with it, that it died while in the hospital tank once I started the hypo treatment. The hippo had quite a few spots, but I've seen worse. Still, I knew it could get much worse if I didn't do something about it.
I had gotten all sorts of advice about it from the LFS including, just turn up the temp, feed garlic, ich is always in the tank, reduce stress, etc, etc. I tried all these things and did a lot of reading. I found out that most of these things were just common myths and being a reasonable science minded guy myself, I understood that a parasite (or any living organism) isn't just going to spontaneously materialize in my tank. It had to have been imported.
After reading about the various methods to cure the ich (not including the supposed "reef safe" remedies) I narrowed down three that seemed to be the best..
1) Hyposalinity
2) Tank Transfer Method
3) Copper
Tank transfer, I felt, would be too hard to do for me. Although, in hindsight, the 2 weeks that TTM takes might be worth it. But then again, you have to keep the display fallow for 8 weeks anyway, so...
I decided against copper as I felt it would be a bit more stressful on the fish and I didn't want to accidentally introduce copper to my DT.
I went with hyposalinity. I caught all the fish (which was a pain) and transferred them to a hospital tank. I reduced salinity in a few steps over the course of the day (I had read that it was fairly safe to do this over one day, although in the future I would probably stretch it out to 2 days) till it read 1.08 on my refractometer. After four days in hypo, I saw no more spots.
The fish stayed in hypo for 4 weeks after that last ich spot was seen. I then began the process to raise the salinity. This came at a time that work became busy, so this actually took longer than expected. Come to think of it, I might have been at 1.08/1.09 for more like 5 weeks and then it took like 2 weeks to raise the salinity back to 1.026. After that I observed the fish for another 4 weeks and saw no spots. I treated with prazi after that for two weeks because I suspected flukes as well.
At this point the fish all seemed healthy. I finally transferred them back to the display tank Feb 20th. Today I saw white spots on the hippo again and it was flashing against the rocks.
In this time, here is what was added to the tank:
Geometric Pygmy Hawk was added on the 27th (last Saturday). I miscalculated and thought it had been 4 weeks, but it had only been 2 1/2. During QT it seemed fine and no obvious signs of ich were detected (flashing, spots). I did neglect to freshwater dip that guy before putting him in the QT as I was in a rush and also I read on Wet Web Media that they are pretty resistant to parasites.
I also added another emerald crab on Sunday directly to the DT. I decided not to QT because of the low likelihood that it would introduce something into the tank.
I took care not to add any water from any of these other systems into the DT. However, my usual way of doing this is to empty the bag into a large specimen container and then netting out the animals and dropping them into the DT.
Now, about two days ago, I did add some pods from getyourpods.com into the system, but I thought that would be fairly low risk, and how do you go about QTing pods anyway?
In all this, where do you guys think it most likely that ich was reintroduced to the system or do you think that maybe there were still some cysts in the system after all this time? Or could it be something other than ich (I'm still in partial denial). How long after introducing an infected fish would it take for another fish to show symptoms?
Thanks for the help. I'm feeling pretty down about all this. At least if I have to go through this again, my RO/DI system is set up and my saltwater mixing station is almost ready to go which should make things easier than running out to the store to buy water all the time.
--Krullshards
I made all the mistakes a newb can make when starting out in the hobby including buying a mandarin for a new tank without a refugium, buying a "small" hippo tang for a Biocube thinking I could get a year out of it and move it to a bigger tank (those things grow so fast), and being completely oblivious to quarantining best practices among many other things.
That said, I've also learned a tremendous amount in that time. The ich life cycle, signs and treatment for flukes, better filtration methods, proper water chemistry for reef tanks, and much much more.
Now, onto my dilemma. I had a bad ich outbreak in October or so last year. I say it was bad, because a neon goby I had bought from LiveAquaria became so overcome with it, that it died while in the hospital tank once I started the hypo treatment. The hippo had quite a few spots, but I've seen worse. Still, I knew it could get much worse if I didn't do something about it.
I had gotten all sorts of advice about it from the LFS including, just turn up the temp, feed garlic, ich is always in the tank, reduce stress, etc, etc. I tried all these things and did a lot of reading. I found out that most of these things were just common myths and being a reasonable science minded guy myself, I understood that a parasite (or any living organism) isn't just going to spontaneously materialize in my tank. It had to have been imported.
After reading about the various methods to cure the ich (not including the supposed "reef safe" remedies) I narrowed down three that seemed to be the best..
1) Hyposalinity
2) Tank Transfer Method
3) Copper
Tank transfer, I felt, would be too hard to do for me. Although, in hindsight, the 2 weeks that TTM takes might be worth it. But then again, you have to keep the display fallow for 8 weeks anyway, so...
I decided against copper as I felt it would be a bit more stressful on the fish and I didn't want to accidentally introduce copper to my DT.
I went with hyposalinity. I caught all the fish (which was a pain) and transferred them to a hospital tank. I reduced salinity in a few steps over the course of the day (I had read that it was fairly safe to do this over one day, although in the future I would probably stretch it out to 2 days) till it read 1.08 on my refractometer. After four days in hypo, I saw no more spots.
The fish stayed in hypo for 4 weeks after that last ich spot was seen. I then began the process to raise the salinity. This came at a time that work became busy, so this actually took longer than expected. Come to think of it, I might have been at 1.08/1.09 for more like 5 weeks and then it took like 2 weeks to raise the salinity back to 1.026. After that I observed the fish for another 4 weeks and saw no spots. I treated with prazi after that for two weeks because I suspected flukes as well.
At this point the fish all seemed healthy. I finally transferred them back to the display tank Feb 20th. Today I saw white spots on the hippo again and it was flashing against the rocks.
In this time, here is what was added to the tank:
Geometric Pygmy Hawk was added on the 27th (last Saturday). I miscalculated and thought it had been 4 weeks, but it had only been 2 1/2. During QT it seemed fine and no obvious signs of ich were detected (flashing, spots). I did neglect to freshwater dip that guy before putting him in the QT as I was in a rush and also I read on Wet Web Media that they are pretty resistant to parasites.
I also added another emerald crab on Sunday directly to the DT. I decided not to QT because of the low likelihood that it would introduce something into the tank.
I took care not to add any water from any of these other systems into the DT. However, my usual way of doing this is to empty the bag into a large specimen container and then netting out the animals and dropping them into the DT.
Now, about two days ago, I did add some pods from getyourpods.com into the system, but I thought that would be fairly low risk, and how do you go about QTing pods anyway?
In all this, where do you guys think it most likely that ich was reintroduced to the system or do you think that maybe there were still some cysts in the system after all this time? Or could it be something other than ich (I'm still in partial denial). How long after introducing an infected fish would it take for another fish to show symptoms?
Thanks for the help. I'm feeling pretty down about all this. At least if I have to go through this again, my RO/DI system is set up and my saltwater mixing station is almost ready to go which should make things easier than running out to the store to buy water all the time.
--Krullshards
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