Fish Have Ick

[joshrm115]

I bout some pretty expensive mediations but does any one any any other suggestions??

 

[Piltdownpaul]

King british ws3 is a good whitespot treatment. Concentrated but does the job.

 

[OldMan47]

There is a link in my signature to a thorough discussion of ich. It includes details about the parasites' life cycle and treatment options that will not cost you a fortune.

 

[Bignose]

There is a link in my signature to a thorough discussion of ich. It includes details about the parasites' life cycle and treatment options that will not cost you a fortune.

I know that I said this specifically about the link OldMan47 has in his sig, but really, that page on the Skeptical Aquarist website about ich is by and far the best collection of info I have ever seen on the internet about ich. You have to go read scientific journals to find a better collection of info.

It will tell you about the nature of the organism, and the nature of the organism is critical to understand to fully beat it. The short of it is that ich has a 3 to 4 day lifecycle at tropical temperatures, but the real kicker is that it is vulnerable to medication only during a few hours of those 3 to 4 days. That is, you only have a small window to kill any individual organism. So, any medicine that claims "one dose and removes ich permanently" is wrong (with one exception, see next paragraph). Any medicine that wants you to dose for only 3 days is wrong. You want to does every single day until all signs disappear (all flicking, all visible spots) and then dose for 8 more days in a row. 12 or 15 more if the fish don't seem too stressed out from the medicine. The point is that you want the ich to go through at least 2 more full lifecycles, so that each organism is susceptible to being killed at least 2 more times, and you want there to be active medication in the water to kill them during those vulnerable times. Just because all the visible effects are gone, doesn't necessarily mean that all the ich is gone. There could be ich hiding the fish's gills. There could be ich spots that are just too small to see with the naked eye. A fish could just be an asymptomatic carrier. The biggest thing is that if you don't treat for many days after all visible infection signs are gone, there is a decent chance it will come back, and then you'll be back on the forum complaining about the "neverending ich".

The one exception is a copper-based treatment. That will stay active in the water for around 30 days. All the other ich medicines become inactive after 24 hours or so. But, most people don't like to use copper-based treatments because it will kill all the snails and other invertebrates in the tank, and some fish, too. Copper is a lot more toxic to fish than to people. I like the non-copper ones because they do become inactive after 24 hours. You still want to do large water changes and run carbon for a while to get all the old meds out when done. They become inactive because they are oxidizers (they kill the ich by oxidizing the organic molecules in the ich organism) and there is lost of oxygen in the water for the oxidizing molecules to work.

But, again, all this is covered -- in more detail -- on Skeptical's page. It is well worth your time to read that page. Come back and ask on the forum if you have any questions, too! That's pretty much what the forum is for!