Is The Ich Gone?

[fishryummy]

hey all- so i've been treating my tank for ich (lost 3 fish) and i think it's gone... the problem is that the dalmation mollies have clear/white fins. i can't tell if the spots are damage to the fins or ich. i'd like the ich to be gone so can put my filter back in, i feel 2 of the fish died less from ich and more so from raising ammonia levels due to lack of filtration. i do have an ammonia blocker liquid and i've be doing water changes(maybe not enough?) this is my 8th day treating.

 

[OldMan47]

You do not remove all filtration when treating for ich. You merely remove carbon filtration since carbon can remove many of the chemicals used to treat for ich, such as malachite green. If you have a filter that is cycled, return it to the tank. You may find that you need to do huge water changes to keep your ammonia under control, especially if you let the filter media dry out.
Ich treatments that rely on medications that cannot be used with carbon make treating ich more difficult than it needs to be. I treat ich with simple salt and high temperatures. The end result is just as deadly to the ich parasites but it does not kill my filter bacteria and means that my fish need never go without a biological filter. The link I would love to send you to no longer seems to work. It seems that the skeptical aquarist site is no longer functioning.
Ich has a fairly short life cycle at 85F, 29.5C. At that temperature, after the last vestige of infection is gone from the last of your fish, the treatment will have killed all remaining ich parasites in about 3 to 4 more days. I use 5 days as a safety measure, just in case I missed spotting a single ich parasite on one of my fish. If you find that you have an ammonia or nitrite problem during that time, it must be dealt with using a water change and the medication must be reapplied right away. If even an hour goes by with no treatment present in the water, the fish may become reinfested with the parasites. Repeated infestations is a sure way to kill off fish in my experience. If you deal with ich as soon as it is spotted, you will seldom lose any fish to the disease itself.
At the high temperatures that we use to treat ich, most fish will have trouble getting enough oxygen. Almost always it is a good idea to add an air stone to the tank being treated to promote good water circulation and the resultant maximum gas exchange at the surface of the water. Many patent treatments for ich contain chemicals that are easily removed by carbon, so any carbon filtration must be removed when using those treatments, but other forms of filtration should be left in place.

 

[fishryummy]

At the high temperatures that we use to treat ich, most fish will have trouble getting enough oxygen. Almost always it is a good idea to add an air stone to the tank being treated to promote good water circulation and the resultant maximum gas exchange at the surface of the water. Many patent treatments for ich contain chemicals that are easily removed by carbon, so any carbon filtration must be removed when using those treatments, but other forms of filtration should be left in place.

what other forms of filtration do you mean? all my filter has is carbon in a sack. how much salt should i use? it's a 20 gallon tank.
(and thanks for replying)

 

[OldMan47]

Cut the sack open and dump the carbon. All filters provide biological and particulate treatment as well as chemical, carbon, treatment. The treatment that I recall, and I really wish that the skeptical aquarist was up and running, is about 2 tablespoons of salt per gallon. I am not certain of that value because I never thought I needed to write it down and I seldom have an ich problem. The bacteria that are responsible for treating things like ammonia and nitrite are not at all a function of the carbon. As long as you keep all but the carbon running on your tank the ammonia and nitrites will be controlled while the carbon is gone from your filter. I use many Whisper filters that contain tiny amounts of carbon and I ignore those bits. My Whisper cartridges contain such small amounts of carbon that I suspect the carbon is only included to allow the manufacturers to make the claim that they have carbon. As it is I suspect the carbon in them is ineffective after a mere day or two. That means that a cartridge I have had on a tank for a couple of weeks has such small chemical removal effectiveness that I would not worry about it when treating a tank. I would simply leave it in place and ignore the carbon.

 

[fishryummy]

Cut the sack open and dump the carbon. All filters provide biological and particulate treatment as well as chemical, carbon, treatment. The treatment that I recall, and I really wish that the skeptical aquarist was up and running, is about 2 tablespoons of salt per gallon. I am not certain of that value because I never thought I needed to write it down and I seldom have an ich problem. The bacteria that are responsible for treating things like ammonia and nitrite are not at all a function of the carbon. As long as you keep all but the carbon running on your tank the ammonia and nitrites will be controlled while the carbon is gone from your filter. I use many Whisper filters that contain tiny amounts of carbon and I ignore those bits. My Whisper cartridges contain such small amounts of carbon that I suspect the carbon is only included to allow the manufacturers to make the claim that they have carbon. As it is I suspect the carbon in them is ineffective after a mere day or two. That means that a cartridge I have had on a tank for a couple of weeks has such small chemical removal effectiveness that I would not worry about it when treating a tank. I would simply leave it in place and ignore the carbon.

mine is a whisper too. i guess i'll poke around the internet and see if i can pin down the salt/gallon ratio. one thing i don"t have is a heater.i live in a hot state and my apartment has no AC. frankly i was more worried about keeping the fish cool this summer. maybe i can jury rig something...
and i'm taking your tip about the carbon right now!

 

[OldMan47]

Raising temperature merely speeds up the cure, it is not essential. A cure that might take 4 days after the last sign of parasites at 85F would take more like 6 days at lower temperatures. The way we heated tanks when I was a kid was to use higher wattage incandescent bulbs in the light strips. In those days they were all incandescent. It is a tough thing to control but it worked.

 

[fishryummy]

update! so i decided that the medicine i was useing (quickcure) was doing no good at all. i waited 24 hours and returned the whole filter to it's proper place. i found a website (for goldfish) that said to add 3tsps per gallon to treat ich. that seemed like way too much, so i settled on 2 per gallon. what you do is dissolve one third of the salt in tank water and add one third every 12 hours over 36 hours. amazing! within 24 hours, even before adding all the salt, the change was wonderful! everyone perked up and is eating again. the male molly is still ....restful, but he eats and the female molly is fine so i can hope he's healing. the ghost shrimp, who were heavily infested, are almost ich free and i can't see any spots on the fish at all! even the fry and the plants seem ok with the salt. (but idk how long the plants will last, small price to pay!) thank you for pointing out the right way!

 

[fishryummy]

sigh- lost the male molly. now the female is acting weird. if she dies then every single fish i got from petsmart will have died. and let's not forget it was a molly from petsmart that started this (the ich) in the first place. learned my lesson! the three fish from my LFS (pair of guppies and a male swordtail) are perky, glossy and a joy to watch. i'm not normally one of those "down with evil big box stores" people, but it's clearly not a system that's healthy for live stock. uncool petsmart, uncool.

 

[The chilly dipper]

sigh- lost the male molly. now the female is acting weird. if she dies then every single fish i got from petsmart will have died. and let's not forget it was a molly from petsmart that started this (the ich) in the first place. learned my lesson! the three fish from my LFS (pair of guppies and a male swordtail) are perky, glossy and a joy to watch. i'm not normally one of those "down with evil big box stores" people, but it's clearly not a system that's healthy for live stock. uncool petsmart, uncool.

im sorry about your fish mate.
i too had an infestation of ich and lost 1 fish.
i will tell you now that examining each fish you buy is somtimes hard to do.this is because the shop owner is very fast and never gets the exact individual fish you want(never in my experience anyway).

the best way to avoid this is the good old quaranteen tank.
treat with a general medicine,if anything is spotted-then release into the community.

this however is expensive to do for the keeper who has only 1 tank.
in the past i have used interpet whitespot treatment.
this product is amazing!!!!

it was a harsh price to pay because of the effect on the biological filter,but saved my fish from the brink.
i recommend this if all hope is lost.

the salt treatment is hit and miss and most often miss,that is not to say salt dont work,it all depends on the severity of the infestation.

once again im sorry to hear about you loss

 

[OldMan47]

A properly applied salt treatment is one of the best ones you can have. It does not have the toxicity problems of malachite green and methylene blue treatments but it is just as effective. It also will not kill off your filter bacteria or cause other secondary effects.
Patent medicines for ich are almost always a simple combination of those two chemicals and require you to mess about with the filter so that you don't remove the dyes as fast as you add them. The stuff can also permanently stain the tank's silicone seals.

 

[fishryummy]

yeah, all my seals are blue now, good thing i think it's almost pretty! i think all the ich is gone! if things stay good for another week i'm going to add some new fish! a female swordtail, and maybe a handful of small schooling fish? i do wish i had room for a quarantine tank, but i have a 3 room apartment, one 20 gallon is really all i have room for!

 

[The chilly dipper]

yeah, all my seals are blue now, good thing i think it's almost pretty! i think all the ich is gone! if things stay good for another week i'm going to add some new fish! a female swordtail, and maybe a handful of small schooling fish? i do wish i had room for a quarantine tank, but i have a 3 room apartment, one 20 gallon is really all i have room for!

nice one mate
thank you old man
we are forever learning