I have lost fish to ick in the past, this time I was almost ready, and much more equipped. I have a new fish that got ick after a few days, watched it close.... Only roughly 5 spots... Fish was super active, seemed really healthy, eating great. A week later after being stable at 5 spots hoping it would fight off ick it then had about 3 dozen spots... Quickly moved to qt with coppersafe and 3 days later (now) the fish is completely covered in ick.... Hundreds of spots.... Does copper safe not work? Does it take a couple days for the fish to produce the white cysts to cover ick? Asking because fish seemed okay yesterday and seems nearly dead now...
Ick/ich
- Thread starter Stanzo13
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The white spots we see with ich are not the oarasites themselves but the fish’s response to them. Copper will treat ich and marine velvet as long as the tank reaches and is maintained to therapeutic levels.
Accurate testing, top off and water changes will help to achieve this.
But copper is only capable of treating free swimming parasites any parasites on the fish or encrusted will not be effected.
Fwiw hundreds of spots sounds more like velvet than ich.
Accurate testing, top off and water changes will help to achieve this.
But copper is only capable of treating free swimming parasites any parasites on the fish or encrusted will not be effected.
Fwiw hundreds of spots sounds more like velvet than ich.
The biggest issues i have had with copper are controlling ammonia and appetite suppression.
If the fish is still eating.
You could do a fw bath to relieve some of the symptoms. https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/freshwater-dip.248898/
If not eating could do a 50% water change get the fish eating again. Then bring back up to therapeutic levels over a day or 2. Then restart the qt clock.
If the fish is still eating.
You could do a fw bath to relieve some of the symptoms. https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/freshwater-dip.248898/
If not eating could do a 50% water change get the fish eating again. Then bring back up to therapeutic levels over a day or 2. Then restart the qt clock.
Are you saying from no copper to full treatment in an instant is bad? I don't recall anything about adding it slow... That being said is a fw dip even worth considering when using copper?
Reefer_Tom
Community Member
I believe that the fish will have to carry out the live cycle of the ick that is already on him as the fall off the copper should kill them but you will also want to do water changes daily sucking water off the bottom of the aquarium to pick up any fallen ick eggs
Some fish handle copper better than others. That said its always a good practice to raise copper slowly to allow the fish time to acclimate to it. The fw dip at this stage would be to provide some comfort to the fish, its like scratching the parasites on the fish. But if the fish is eating, i would not. If the fish is having labored breathing you could also do a methylene blue bath(30 minutes). Will help the fish capture O2.
Besides that.
Feed well, make sure the foods you are feeding are providing the nutrients it needs, with special attention to vitamin c, vitamin e and amino acids for being in copper. A varied diet of different frozen foods and nori should accomplish this.
Besides that.
Feed well, make sure the foods you are feeding are providing the nutrients it needs, with special attention to vitamin c, vitamin e and amino acids for being in copper. A varied diet of different frozen foods and nori should accomplish this.
Leave your tank without fish for 76 days so the parasite dies off and starves without a host.
Losses are pretty normal in this hobby....just take money and light it on fire to get used to the feeling.
If you want some disease free fish....ordering directly from ORA of captive bred fish that were never mixed with wild is a good start. You can do this by shopping the ORA section in LA or ordering from your LFS and picking up the fish IN THE BAG before they touch LFS water. You can also pay premium for fish fully quarentined by someone else.
Your tank has to run 76 days without fish first ofc...
Keep in mind anything you add to the tank...even corals or snails risks bringing in disease. You can lower the chances by ordering from quality coral venders like WWC... cultivated reef...battle corals and so on.
Squidward
Valuable Member
I felt the same way until I heard about the Tank Transfer Method. I do this Qurantine method with all of my fish now in order to have an ich free tank. You don't have to deal with copper and your fish don't have to deal with copper. And it's only 12 days in quarantine.
So buy more thanks more salt more fish how about SMD apparently coppersafe dosent kill ick, if it's life cycle is known then why isent their a product to kill it? This should be simple, but if a company can sell a million gimmicks and a million fish die.... Theirs going to be a million more customers? How about shut them down.
If the ick life cycle is 4 or 5 days, and some of the most advance reefers say 6-8 weeks fishless Why is someone here saying 76 days.. that is more than double..... Why isent it time to cut the B's with ick as of 10 years ago? None of it should be a guessing game or just luck by this point
There were studies that show the torments can lie dormant for 76 days( I think this is the right number). I suggest reading in the disease forums. They are several very smart people in there that have written all the who, what, wheres, and whys already
I'm sorry that you lost your fish; that's never easy to go through.
The lifecycle of the marine ich parasite is pretty well established at this point, but that's a relatively recent thing. The problem with eliminating it entirely is that it's a pretty hardy parasite (as most are) and anything that could kill it would likely also kill the host as well - the fish, that is. In terms of treatment, then, we have to focus our efforts at eliminating the parasite during its weakest point of life - which happens to be when it's swimming around. Which it actually does twice in its life; we aim for the stage where it's swimming around looking for a new host fish, because at that point it's basically a baby parasite with a weaker protective structure. This is where copper comes in. Copper is poison and at the right levels, that poison will kill the parasite. At high enough concentrations, copper will also kill fish. So the goal is to get the copper high enough to kill the parasite, but low enough to not kill the fish. Because copper IS poison to fish, it's often important to give some of the more delicate fish a chance to acclimate to the presence of the copper in the water. Rather like how if you were to jump into a cold pool on a hot day, it's going to be more of a shock than if you were to slowly lower yourself into the water. Same thing here; if the fish is given time to get used to the copper, it can better handle it (to a point; copper can still kill them no matter how slow you introduce it).
In terms of the "white dots" on the fish; those are wounds. The "baby" parasite that's swimming around attaches to the fish and burrows in to get under the skin. This leaves behind a wound, which the fish's immune system attempts to heal via a scab. That scab is the white spot you see. This immune system response - and the extra energy toll it takes on the fish - is why it's important to ensure that the fish is eating well and in good health throughout treatment.
Once burrowed in, the parasite grows and matures. This process can take anywhere from 3-9 days studies have found. Once dug in, there's nothing that can really be done to cure the fish of the parasite, though dipping it in fresh water can help to reduce the number of parasites that burrow in (fish handle this fresh water bath better than the parasites do, so newly attached parasites may fall off before the fish must be returned to the saltwater it needs to survive).
Once the parasite is done growing, it releases from the fish and drops off the fish to settle into the bottom of the tank (which might take up to 8hrs). There, it begins a process of reproducing which can last up to 72 days. Following that period, it releases the "babies" into the water, which is back where we started. The babies (theronts) have about 48hrs to find a host before they run out of energy and die.
When you look at all those times, you can get a picture of where our treatment timelines come from. The "76 days fallow" starts with the assumption that you have mature parasites (protomonts) floating about in your water just fallen off the last fish you just removed from the tank. If we assume they take 8hrs to settle (round up to a day for easy math), then 72 days to reproduce (as a "tomite"), then 2 days to float around looking for a fish before they die - 1+72+2 = 75. We generally suggest adding a day or two so that there's a margin for error, so the common fallow period suggested is "76 days". You could do less, but you risk not eliminating the parasite from the tank - which makes all the effort spent meaningless.
Now as to why there aren't better treatments available;
One problem is in the hardiness of the parasite relative to the hardiness of the things we care about in our tanks. Corals don't handle copper anywhere near as well as fish. Nor do inverts (snails, crabs, clams, etc.). Even some of the beneficial bacteria we cultivate have issues with it. That makes it tough to treat in a tank where all that exists. There are other medications and methods out there that can target the parasites (Chloroquine Phosphate, for example), but again - those would harm the more fragile tank inhabitants as well. There are just no known weaknesses that the parasites we want to eliminate have that don't also exist in the things we're trying to save.
Another problem that's more recent (and complex) is that these parasites - for many reasons beyond my ability to list here - exist in the supply chain. It's not that we're pulling fish out of the oceans with these parasites, it's that the fish are added to tanks where the parasite exists and are infected. For you or I to hold a tank fallow for 76 days, it's no small effort. For a distributor who might have hundreds of tanks all within close proximity to each other (the parasites are suspected of being able to travel up to 10ft via aerosol transmission), getting the tanks clean would be nigh-impossible without a risk of going out of business. And even if they did get their tanks clean, any new fish may be infected and so the problem continues. That's why many distributors (and then retailers) are running low-levels of copper in their holding tanks. The lower levels allow fish to be added/removed without the acclimation period, but helps to keep the parasite populations down. It may also be creating parasites resistant to copper, however, so the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better...
The lifecycle of the marine ich parasite is pretty well established at this point, but that's a relatively recent thing. The problem with eliminating it entirely is that it's a pretty hardy parasite (as most are) and anything that could kill it would likely also kill the host as well - the fish, that is. In terms of treatment, then, we have to focus our efforts at eliminating the parasite during its weakest point of life - which happens to be when it's swimming around. Which it actually does twice in its life; we aim for the stage where it's swimming around looking for a new host fish, because at that point it's basically a baby parasite with a weaker protective structure. This is where copper comes in. Copper is poison and at the right levels, that poison will kill the parasite. At high enough concentrations, copper will also kill fish. So the goal is to get the copper high enough to kill the parasite, but low enough to not kill the fish. Because copper IS poison to fish, it's often important to give some of the more delicate fish a chance to acclimate to the presence of the copper in the water. Rather like how if you were to jump into a cold pool on a hot day, it's going to be more of a shock than if you were to slowly lower yourself into the water. Same thing here; if the fish is given time to get used to the copper, it can better handle it (to a point; copper can still kill them no matter how slow you introduce it).
In terms of the "white dots" on the fish; those are wounds. The "baby" parasite that's swimming around attaches to the fish and burrows in to get under the skin. This leaves behind a wound, which the fish's immune system attempts to heal via a scab. That scab is the white spot you see. This immune system response - and the extra energy toll it takes on the fish - is why it's important to ensure that the fish is eating well and in good health throughout treatment.
Once burrowed in, the parasite grows and matures. This process can take anywhere from 3-9 days studies have found. Once dug in, there's nothing that can really be done to cure the fish of the parasite, though dipping it in fresh water can help to reduce the number of parasites that burrow in (fish handle this fresh water bath better than the parasites do, so newly attached parasites may fall off before the fish must be returned to the saltwater it needs to survive).
Once the parasite is done growing, it releases from the fish and drops off the fish to settle into the bottom of the tank (which might take up to 8hrs). There, it begins a process of reproducing which can last up to 72 days. Following that period, it releases the "babies" into the water, which is back where we started. The babies (theronts) have about 48hrs to find a host before they run out of energy and die.
When you look at all those times, you can get a picture of where our treatment timelines come from. The "76 days fallow" starts with the assumption that you have mature parasites (protomonts) floating about in your water just fallen off the last fish you just removed from the tank. If we assume they take 8hrs to settle (round up to a day for easy math), then 72 days to reproduce (as a "tomite"), then 2 days to float around looking for a fish before they die - 1+72+2 = 75. We generally suggest adding a day or two so that there's a margin for error, so the common fallow period suggested is "76 days". You could do less, but you risk not eliminating the parasite from the tank - which makes all the effort spent meaningless.
Now as to why there aren't better treatments available;
One problem is in the hardiness of the parasite relative to the hardiness of the things we care about in our tanks. Corals don't handle copper anywhere near as well as fish. Nor do inverts (snails, crabs, clams, etc.). Even some of the beneficial bacteria we cultivate have issues with it. That makes it tough to treat in a tank where all that exists. There are other medications and methods out there that can target the parasites (Chloroquine Phosphate, for example), but again - those would harm the more fragile tank inhabitants as well. There are just no known weaknesses that the parasites we want to eliminate have that don't also exist in the things we're trying to save.
Another problem that's more recent (and complex) is that these parasites - for many reasons beyond my ability to list here - exist in the supply chain. It's not that we're pulling fish out of the oceans with these parasites, it's that the fish are added to tanks where the parasite exists and are infected. For you or I to hold a tank fallow for 76 days, it's no small effort. For a distributor who might have hundreds of tanks all within close proximity to each other (the parasites are suspected of being able to travel up to 10ft via aerosol transmission), getting the tanks clean would be nigh-impossible without a risk of going out of business. And even if they did get their tanks clean, any new fish may be infected and so the problem continues. That's why many distributors (and then retailers) are running low-levels of copper in their holding tanks. The lower levels allow fish to be added/removed without the acclimation period, but helps to keep the parasite populations down. It may also be creating parasites resistant to copper, however, so the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better...
artieg1
Active Member
I would recommend, before doing anything else, that you read exhaustively the disease and quarantine stickies in the beginners forum, particularly those on ich and velvet. (This sounds like velvet). I believe your frustration is coming from lack of information. For example, copper does not "treat" an infection of ich or velvet; it does nothing to the parasites on the fish. Rather, it kills the next life cycle stage when the parasites inevitably drop off the fish. So 4 days in copper is nothing and would not help any fish that is infected. What you are experiencing is what drives most people out of the hobby. The only antidote is more information.
