basically, do cleaner shrimp eat the free floating ich?

[devolette]

i just have a question about something i thought up. we have our fish in a hospital tank about to start hyposalinity because they have marine ich and i've read that the LFS will do a fresh water dip on a fish every day until their ich is gone? i know it stays in the water as free floating and it cycles and takes weeks an such. i'm wondering if we kept our fish in a hospital with normal salinity and did a fresh water dip on the two fish every day and maybe had a cleaner shirmp.. would that help? then i was thinking if i did a fresh water dip on them before putting them back in the display tank, obviously after the ich has cycled out, would that prevent it from making it back in my DT?

 

[KoleTang]

Cleaner shrimp do not eat ich. It is a myth. Ich is barely noticed in the wild since it drops off a fish and goes to the next target. In the aquarium, it keeps dropping off then getting back on the same fish. So cleaner shrimp have never really seen it before. Even if they do eat it, they won't eat enough for it to matter.

Do not do the fresh water dip treatment. You should only do one freshwater dip if you want to. Multiple dips will cause a lot of stress.

Treat your QT tank with cupramine. Make sure it is cupramine and make sure you use a test kit for copper.

 

[Oceanslayer18]

+1 cleaner shrimp help some to the fish but do not rid the problem. Cupramine is a good solution if used make sure to add a airstone to the system. Ich also is dormant in many fish and can be caused by stress, temp flux, and salinity change. It something you may incounter multiple times. Feed your fish very well all the time to encourage good health and a strong immune system.

 

[Mike J.]

Have you read this? Don't you also have ich in your DT?Lee Birch's (Chemist and Microbiologist) Advice on Ich (Cryptocaryon irritans)

 

[kateater]

+1 on the cupramine but copper test kits are extremely hard to read. If you don't maintain correct amount it will be ineffective. Check it double then triple check your copper levels! Freshwater dips really don't do a lot for ich but other parasites it works really well. Make sure temperature and PH are spot on before you dip. Running a UV sterilizer on the HP will help with anything in the water.

 

[devolette]

thanks guys, i've read into the cupramine and copper treatments and all of that, we have test kits and even bought a refractometer (freaking sweet piece of equipment!) and we've chosen to go the hyposalinity rout with this. we've lost all our fish but one (had six.) we had them all in a 70 gallon and moved the last guy (a clown fish) into a 20 long. they for sure have the kind of MI that can be treated in hyposalinity and i'd rather not somewhat poison my fish. i mean, maybe i should have because maybe then they'd all be alive but then i'd have this ****** 70 corner bow that i couldn't ever put inverts in, right? and mike, i love all those articles, i've read most of them and they're soo helpful. that particular hyposalinity article is what we're going off of. i was going to post a link but you already did! so yeah, the clown is alone in the 20 now and we're slowly lowering the salinity checking ammonia nitrites and ph while the DT is chillin'.

 

[KoleTang]

It is harder to get the fish back to normal salinity from hypo.

It is not poison. Notice how no one said copper, everyone said cupramine. That is because seachem created a gentle type of copper that does not poison the fish.

Just like how they made paragaurd as a substitute for cancer-causing formalin.

 

[devolette]

so cupramine won't make it so i can't use that tank for inverts in the future like copper does? and i thought it was pretty much the same just because every time i've gone to read about it people just refer to it as 'copper.' i've bee doing research about all this ich treatment for honestly too long, wish i got started sooner so i could have maybe saved my fish but we are very tight on money especially after buying a new tank, heater, salt, refractometer and a test kit and can't afford to buy cupramine along with another test kit at this very moment so we're going on with the hyposalinity. i know it takes weeks to get it back to normal salinity, i'm okay with that. now that it's just a 20 gallon it should be easier to control the ammonia and such as well. we've been using sodium carbonate for ph. do you have a good article or whatever on cupramine treatment? maybe i'll use it in the future on a quarantine.