First Signs Of Ich

[xJake]

My clown loaches seemed to get really stressed out when I did a 25% water change last night and were grayed out for hours. This morning when I woke up they were scratching on the gravel and rocks and a couple have 1 or 2 white salt-grain spots on them. This seems to be the first stages of ich. Can anyone recommend to me meds that are safe for loaches and still work well? Also, recommendations on how to go about treating them would be nice.

 

[WILDER]

Location would be good for a med, sounds like whitespot with the grains of salt on them.

 

[xJake]

Do you have a link or something? I can't find any info on that med.

 

[fish_fetish65]

lol! they're asking where you live. the US and UK have very different medication brands.

anyhow, ick is a pain in the drain. nearly wiped out my entire tank. my personal recommendation would be to increase the temp. to about 86 degrees fahrenheit, add salt (i believe the recommendation is 1tblsp/5G... but you might want to cut that in half with loaches), and add some medication. make sure to have LOTS of surface disruption, as the temp increase and medications will drastically decrease the amount of O2 in your water.

some of the best parasite medication i have found has been "general cure", which i know is carried in the US. not sure about UK medications, though.

 

[xJake]

lol! they're asking where you live. the US and UK have very different medication brands.

DOH!

I live in the US.

 

[fish_fetish65]

okay then. i would definitely go with general cure... or else quick cure. stuff works miracles. i love it!

 

[d3tained]

Howdy fellow fish keeper.

I had this same thing.Lost one fish during it.

Salt defenitly worked for me.I have a YoYo Loach and he wasnt affected atall by the salt as I used normal amounts and now he is the bigegst of all.

You probally had ich in the tank before the 25% waterchange but it could have triggered stress.What I did is 50% water change to get rid of most of the free swimming parasites.As stated I uped the temp to 28 degrees Celcius.After that I added the recommended dose of meds.Be carefull with overdosing as you have loaches.Also add the meds into the 50 % water you are putting back into the tank and the salt so that its not consetrated.Switch off the lights and check on them every 12 hours.You will note if all goes well the whitespots will increase in size and fall off.It likely that more spots will appear rather then less but remember there are parasites on teh fish that you cannot see yet.The spots will then cradually dissapear.After 1st dosage as stated on bottle have been done do a second one.Mine was gone in 2 weeks.

ALWAYS remove Carbon filter material.

Hope this helped let us know.

Cherio!

 

[xJake]

I talked to a guy I know at one of the many LFS's I visit (Haven't been out there in awhile though) and he recommended API general cure. It seems to be working well and my loaches are doing fine. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[Bignose]

It is always good to know thy enemy. A really good summary of everything you need to know on how to cure ich can be found here: http/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/health/ich.shtml

For instance, d3 probably did not affect the total population of ich much by doing a water change since only a small percentage of the parasites will be in the free-swimming phase anyway. However, the water change does have a profound affect, since it removes organic waste from the tank. This is important because most ich medications work by oxidizing organic materials. And, the more organics you take out, like fish poo, decaying plant matter, etc. the less medicine will be wasted on oxidizing these non-ich things and the more medicine that will be available to kill the parasite.

Also, make sure you continue dosing for at least 4 days after you see the last spot. I actually usually recommend 7-10 days extra if the fish can handle it, since you have to get every single ich organism or else there is a chance it will come back - and then you will be back on the forums complaining about the everlasting ich. The extra days are because ich is only vulnerable to medications at certain times in its lifecycle, so you have to make sure the entire population goes through its entire lifecycle, which is about 3-4 at tropical temperatures.

All that info I just wrote and more is on the website I posted above.

 

[xJake]

Wow, thanks, that site helped a lot. Good info.