Parasite under the scope - is it ich?

I've been battling ich for weeks now in my 20G with neons. I tried the salt and heat and it only made the neons sick, I lost a few.

I tried ich-X, after several treatments most of them look good, two look really bad. I wanted to cull them but they weren't so sick they were slow, I couldn't catch them without creating a bunch of stress in the tank.

I couldn't stand watching the one suffer so I made an extra effort and managed to catch it. I did scrapings and saw a cyst in an epithelial cell, the cytoplasm was spinning.

I put the deceased fish on a slide and saw many of these covering it. I used my phone to video what I saw but the video is poor. I do have this pic though.

I thought the two poorly ones had secondary epistylis infection but it seems like this looks more like ich. Or something else?

I'm so tired of my fish being sick. I think I got them that way. I cycled my tank, my parameters are zero everything. I don't even have nitrates, I think my plants use it all. I do water changes at least twice a week, once a day when I'm treating with ich-X.

Anyway, here is a poor pic of whatever is affecting my neons. Some of them seem to have finally recovered, it almost seems like some are immune. I was hoping my treatments were over.

any chance of a picture of the fish?

if you have a persistent strain of white spot that won't go away, use copper.

remove snails or shrimp before using copper because it will kill them too.

Colin_T said:

any chance of a picture of the fish?

if you have a persistent strain of white spot that won't go away, use copper.

remove snails or shrimp before using copper because it will kill them too.

Click to expand...

The fish is now deceased. If you do a search on epistylis, it looked like that. I thought for awhile that's what it was but it's not looking that way.

I had looked for copper based stuff but was not successful. I saw a brand on Amazon but it came from the UK and would have taken a long time to get it.

Is there a specific brand you could point me to? I have one mystery snail in that tank but I can put him in my plant bin for awhile.

Will the copper kill my beautiful established amazon swords?

Copper won't affect plants.

I used Waterlife Cuprazin