Hate to beat a dead horse about Ick!

[pookerpics]

Ok, I know this is getting repetitive, but, I've been treating for Ick for about 8 days. I pretty much thought it was gone, but noticed a few sprinkles on my Bala again. I cannot get my temps above 79 or 80 degrees, unless I take a heater from another tank and plug it in to this one. I apparently should have gotten a stronger heater when I went from 20 to 30 gallons. I did salt it (once, because without filters I thought I read that the salt does not evaporate), around one teaspoon per five gallons. It's heavily planted, has ADF's, and assorted tetras and a couple barbs aside from the Bala. (The Bala was my nephews and he was in a 10 gallon tank originally, so I took him and put him in my 20 gallon, then got a 30 gallon). I have no room for anything bigger. Here's a link to my tank:
http://www.pookerpics.com/aquatic.htm
Should I just get a bigger heater and turn up the heat? Should I put some more Ick Super Cure All in? I had already put two new filters in yesterday and I did add some salt this morning. I vacuumed twice in the 8 days, doing about a 25% water change each time.
My plants look terrible, turning yellow, don't know if that's from the medicine or not. Am ready to yank them all out. Any suggestions? [/img]

[fishfreaks]

i suggest just keep adding salt as suggested before, with the filters in, or out if you prefer. if you want to get another heater, thats fine, but it should be fine where your at now, as long as you add either the salt or the other ich meds.

[Thunderkiss]

No more salt. Too much and the plants will hate it, as you have already begun to see. The yellow ones should be looked over, cut the yellow out or yank if it's to the roots.
Normally i'd say just run copper in it but plants hate that too. And the meds may or may not be contributing to the plant die-off. If you have a separate tank i'd say set that up as QT for a week or so and run copper in it. If not a salt water dip may be in order.

[TheOldSalt]

STEP ONE--
Go to walmart and get a plastic tub. You can get then in various sizes and shapes for much less than a glass aquarium would cost.
STEP TWO--
Fill it up with tank water and new water mixed together, and put your tank's filters to work on the plastic tub.
STEP THREE--
Move all your FISH into the tub. Leave the frogs, plants, etc... in the glass tank.
STEP FOUR--
Fill your glass tank back up to the top again with new water.
STEP FIVE--
Dose the tub with something that actually works. I heartily recommend "Coppersafe." Let the fish soak in that for a month.
STEP SIX--
Change the water in the tub after a month. Let the fish recover from treatmnt for another month while the remaining parasites in the main tank starve to death due to lack of host victims. ( fish )
STEP SEVEN--
Return the fish to the tank, happy and healthy, and never again put an unquarantined fish into that tank!!!

You can speed this up by a month if you just break down and restart the main tank while the fish are being treated.

[MyraVan]

As is usually the case, Old Salt's advice sounds spot on.

Regarding the use of salt... At the end of our last discussion about salt (where I was saying that it's useless for ick and chrisinha was saying that a billion Web pages recommend it, and besides, it worked for her [that is, it didn't killl her fish] so it's a valid remedy) I said I would look in books. The idea behind this was that published information is a bit more likely to be true that stuff on the Web, since anyone can put anything on the Web, where at least with a published book, the publishers have some confidence in the expertise of the author...

I looked through all the books on aquarium fish in the library. We also stopped by a pet superstore, so while my husband was taking my daughter to look at birds I looked through all the books with titles like "Fish Health" or "Fish Diseases".

My conclusions are this: most fish books don't go into very much detail. They just say "use a proprietary remedy". The books with titles like "Fish Health" or "Fish Diseases", or the more comprehensive general purpose fish books are more useful. None, I repeat none, of the books suggested adding salt to your tank, so your fish is constantly swimming in salty water, to help cure ick. A couple of the books did suggest that a very concentrated salt dip (like 3% salt, which is on the order of 10 tablespoons of salt per gallon!) for a short period of time (15 min to 1 hour) could help cure some things. Exactly one book suggested using this salt dip as a cure for ich. This was given as oneof the medications you could use, as an alternative to malachite green and such like. They suggested a 1 hour salt dip, once a day, for 7 days. They also made it clear that the fish has to be slowly adjusted to this level of salt, so the only way I could see this working was that you put your fish in another tank (or bucket) with fresh water, then slooooowly increase the concentration of salt until it's 3%, then let your fish swim in that for 1 hour, then do water changes to get the level back down to something more resembling fresh water. This is a very tedious procedure, especially if you have to repeat it once a day for 7 days!

I conclude that the use of a moderate concentration of salt as recommended on many Web pages (one teaspoon per 5 gallons, up to one tablespoon per gallon) that the fish swims in 100% of the time, will do absolutle nothing for ick, and will only stress you fish further, and kill your plants. The only valid use for salt as a cure for ich is a very concentrated (3%) salt dip for a short time, repeated for several days, and doing this properly is likely to be far more hassle than it's worth. I think that the idea of adding salt to your tank to cure ick is just one of those Internet folk cures that has no basis in science.

As for valid ways of getting rid of ich, there were several things mentioned. First, raising the temperature to get the creatures to pop out of the fish sooner. Second, a good medicine to kill them while they're in the free-swimming stage (malachite green was the one most often recommended, but there were several mentioned, including the aforementioned 3% salt dip). Another alternative was the transfer method, where every 12 hours you move your infected fish to a new tank. (This needs alot of tanks to work!) The free-swimming thingies live outside the fish for about 3 days before dividing and attaching to another fish, so if you remove the fish after they've dropped the thingies, and don't put them back in that tank until at least 3 days have passed, the thingies die. As an alternative to the transfer method, see this:
http://aquabotanicwetthumb.infopop.c...24/m/751105934

[pookerpics]

Whew, a month? Ok, I just need to clarify one thing. I have big plastic tubs already I can use, and after I hook up the filters and put my fish in, I DO remove the filter cartridges while I'm medicating, right? Not trying to sound dumb, but sometimes I just like to make sure I am doing something right before I go ahead and do it.

[MyraVan]

If you have any carbon filter media in your filters, you remove that, but you don't remove the normal spongy stuff, since that's where your good bacteria live (the ones that convert ammonia -> nitrite and then nitrite -> nitrate). Carbon must be removed because it filters out the meds from your water, which is exactly what you don't want when treating fish! When they're all beter, you put the carbon in to remove the now un-needed meds. In fact, as far as I can see, that's the best use of carbon filter stuff: not to use it on a regular basis, but to use it to remove meds after your fish are well again.

[pookerpics]

Thanks.