ICH

[MDGraves]

Just wondering if anyone else has had this happen

I got a powder blue tang about 3 months ago put him in my display tank with no quarantine time (never again) and he had a few ich spots a few days later. The spots would come and go with the life cycle of the ich, he never had problems with breathing of eating, he was a major pig. The last outbrake of spots however was more numerous.  Still no issues with eating. Only the blue showed symptoms, clowns, and cromis, never had a prob. This weekend the spots went away on Thursday/Friday, we were out of town Saturday, Returned Sunday to healthy and hungry fish. Monday after noon when the lights came on the blue is dead! 2 cromis dead, my wife got them out as I was at work. This morning another cromis is done and my coral banded shrimp too. All the corals are closed up I assume from all the death
I just put fresh carbon in to absorb any toxins and am going to do 5-10% water changes daily to clean things up over the next bit

Question how long will ick survive with no host fish in the tank?
Will the ick attach to shrimp/crabs/snails?

Thanks
Mark

 

[Blob-79]

that really blows..

it doesnt sound like ich was the cause though.
bad ph swing during the night maybe? what corals do you have and how are they doing now?

 

[MDGraves]

I checked the ph last night and this morning, 8.2
We did get a some polyps from TO last week and an Acan from London last weekend

 

[MDGraves]

The lights do not come on till 4pm so I will have to see how everything is doing tonight

 

[phi delt reefer]

run some UV as well. Couple used units on Canreef if you are interested.

what fish are left?  You need to QT them and start running some ICH treatments for the next 6-8 weeks. Dont add fish for another couple months after that.


I hate to say it but pretty much every other TANG related thread i read is related to ICH. Granted if you have a healthy tang and nothing is going on with your tank we will never hear about it but still - it seems Tangs are just too disease prone of a fish to make the hassle worth while.

may i suggest a group of anthias in the future or other fish. Rarely do i read of a fish other than a Tang bringing the disease into home aquaria. Granted others will get it  - but Tangs are the worst.

 

[MDGraves]

Ya tangs are the ich fish, but they are sooo cool!!
I am just going to run the corals and invertabrates for a while so this crap can blow over

 

[Seggsy]

My blue hippo had ich pretty bad when I first got him - in the end, I let the cleaner shrimp do his just and let it run it's course for about 2 weeks.

Came back once really bad.  I lost a shrimp and another fish - but it turned out that it wasn't the ich, I was using a hydrometer at the time which showed a salt reading of 1.023 when the level was actually over 1.032.  Once I got that fixed, the blue, and the reast of the tank, have all rebounded nicely.

 

[crazybizzle]

Sorry to hear this. I to dont think its ich related thou imo.  The other fish in the tank unless stressed should have a good imune system my tang showed huge signs of ich throughout my tear downs and what not but has always fought it off on his own.  I have lost 2 powders to it but all ither fish in tank have never showed signs has to be something else related to all the deaths

 

[MDGraves]

I think we solved this issue, it was ph swing. The calcium, magnesium, and alkalinity were all a bit low making the tank unstable and haveing a big ph swing at night. We are bringing the levels back to normal and the corals are starting to show their appreciation )

 

[Blob-79]

that really blows..

it doesnt sound like ich was the cause though.
bad ph swing during the night maybe? what corals do you have and how are they doing now?

woo hoo

not that im happy about the problems you had or anything

 

[MDGraves]

Thanks blob, it was hard to track down and conferm, but you defenitly knew what direction to direct me in
Thanks again, expensive lesson, but now we know