Killing ich... ?

[Vegan Peaches]

A worker at PetCo told me Ich can be killed if you bring your water temp. above 84 degrees F.... can anyone confirm this? I have a 150 watt heater, and a 10 gallon tank so I can accomplish this easily but my fish have only ever lived in 75ish degrees so it might stress them out. The fish that had the ich was seperated and died yesterday, and I've been treating the water with malachite green in an aqueous solution, but I want to take all the precautions I can to get rid of this nasty fish killing disease. There's also a possibility that one of my fish had velvet, because it had a filmy silky looking mass all over it just before it died, and I'm not sure at all how to treat that. So any info or insight would be helpful.

Thanks much ^^

 

[pandapops001]

You can buy Anti velvet and slime made by interpet, but i guess you have to first identify that all the symptoms are the same

i think it includes
flicking on objects
hanging at surface
rapid gill movement etc
and obviously the slime

Good Luck anyway, i hope the rest of your fish survive

 

[new fish lover]

I would recommend Mardel's coppersafe. We had a huge Ich problem that we fought for about a month. We raised the temp and used Nox Ich and something else to no avail. Coppersafe will handle Ich and just about anything else your fish might have.

Just read the directions and follow them carefully.

Always keep your temp at a constant. Preferably a little high instead of a little low. You will need to raise the temp to about 80 degrees otherwise the Ich will take forever to go away.

Ich cannot be killed while it is on the fish only once the sack bursts and the ich becomes free swimming can it be killed.

For the future keep in mind scaless fish (ex loaches, catfish) cannot tolerate coppersafe or any other ich meds at full strength.

 

[turbotiber]

I'm using Malachite Green and Meth Blue at the moment (only things I can get here) and so far so good. Raising the temp IS a good idea... otherwise... well yeah, it'll be a long time

 

[ajhainey]

Raising the temp helps in two ways.

First it speeds up the ich lifecycle so they move onto the 'free swimming' stage more quickly and thus can be killed faster (can only kill ich when its free swimming not when its on the fish).

The second is that ich is not that temperature tolerant so in theory if you push the temp up high enough the ich just dies of its own accord.

I'm not sure 84 is high enough to do the second( I heard 89) but it will do the first. To raise your temp go slowly, say a degree a day and the fish should acclimitaise -however you have a long way to go so I wouldn't rely on temp to be your main ich cure...

You may also find water changes help with ich - as you effectively remove the cyst and free swimming ich with each water change.

Good Luck,
aj xx