Anyone used Hyposalinity to cure Ich?

[chasesng]

Im in the process of trying to cure my fish of ich using hyposalinity as per the instructions in Steve Norvich's sticky.

Problem is, I've tried twice now in the past 6 days to bring the salinity down to the recommended 11-12ppt. The first time two fish died within 12 hours. And the remaining 3 fish looked deathly ill.

After several hours of watching the last 3 suffer, i couldnt take it anymore and threw in a slurry to raise the salinity to just under 15ppt. They rebounded pretty quickly.

A few days later I tried lowering the salinity again to the recommended level and again, they pretty quickly looked like they were getting ready to kick the bucket. Raised the salinity to 114 and they rebound almost immediately.

At this point, I figure I'll maintain the QT while the DT is 'fishless' for 8 weeks. And hopefully whatever parasites on the fish in QT will have died from the much lower salinity, even though it wasnt quite at 11ppt.

Curious what experiences others have had.

 

[darod850]

Never worked for me, lost a Naso, blue hippo and a yellow tang like that when I had a 90g, ironically, when it happened to me again i left them alone and did frequent water changes and fed with plenty of vitamins n garlic and fish are alive n well. Also upgraded to a 125 recently to reduce their stress.

 

[nuch]

I never tried it. I had ich once just qt mine. Its WAY to much work. Just qt them be patient and do water changes.

 

[marrone]

When you start to lower the SG the Ph is going to drop, which is probably the reason why you're fish are stressing out and dying.

It's very important when doing Hypo to make sure you have plenty of water breakage and to watch the Ph. You also need to make sure you have a refractormeter to measure the SG, as if it's not correct it's not going work. In the end you also need to make sure you have Ich, as Hypo only works on Ich.

 

[Jzhou]

I've done it, but I only lowered the salinity to 1.015. The issues though is that once you put the fish back in the tank, it will most likely get ich again from the parasites that are still alive in the tank. If you are really having a very bad infestation, i would recommend treating them in a qt tank with copper for 3 months to starve your tank of fish so all the ich will go through its complete life cycle and die.

 

[marrone]

Lowering the SG to 1.015 wouldn't kill off the Ich, it needs to be at or below 1.009.

 

[qy7400]

What are you using to read the salinity?
I've used it in the past with no problems, followed the 5 water changes over a few days but now just use Cupramine for 2 weeks on all new fish.

 

[chasesng]

using refractomer to measure salinity. ph could be oversite on my part but the fish reacted the same to the initial drop in salinity when they first entered the QT as they did when i lowered the salinity in the QT from 114 to 109 (which should have meant little or no drop in ph).

i'm aware of the need to leave the DT fallow for 8 weeks. the trick there is that removing my rockwork to get the fish out seemed to set off a small bloom of these long hair long algae strands. nothing horrible and it seems to have gone away after shortening lights, no food for a day, and less food subsequently.

but the ich diagnosis is a good point and one which i've debated. i'm pretty certain the gramma died of ich. coating on body. diving/rubbing off substrate in what seemed like an effort to scratch itself. the other three fish that died showed no signs of ich, but my blenny had taken a few scratching dives which seemed unusual, but the behavior wasnt consistent.

i do note that novick references an ich survival rate of 40%. i've lost 4 of 7 fish....meaning my survival rate is 42.8%. interesting coincidence?

 

[marrone]

I wouldn't take what he put down as anything more than his opinion. There are case where people will lose nothing, to others where a couple of fish will die to cases where everything dies and only 1 fish is left, to complete wipe out. The rate of survival depends on a lot of things, including how fast you reaction and what you treat with, not to mention you can have a very deathly quick acting strain of ich. In the end you need to treat for what you have, and in a lot of case it mayn't even be ich but something that has the same symptoms.

 

[KathyC]

nothing horrible and it seems to have gone away after shortening lights, no food for a day, and less food subsequently.

Who are you still feeding in the DT?

but the ich diagnosis is a good point and one which i've debated. i'm pretty certain the gramma died of ich. coating on body. diving/rubbing off substrate in what seemed like an effort to scratch itself. the other three fish that died showed no signs of ich, but my blenny had taken a few scratching dives which seemed unusual, but the behavior wasnt consistent.

What did the coating look like?
many fish can have Ich even if you cannot see it. they can be heavioly infested in the gill area - well out of sight

The survival rate with Ich depends a lot on hpw bad the fish are when you begon treating them. Fish with a bad case of Ich should be treated with copper as it works a lot faster than hypo does.