I'm posting here my experience hoping to help someone else that might need to deal with ich.
Last week I found out my some of my fish showing sign of ich, especially the Hipo Tang. He got a lot of white dots on his body, and it seemed to be spreading. At first I treated them with Ick-Attach for 4 days, the symtoms seemed to get worse, so I decided to stop using it, and set up hospital tank and treated them with cupramine instead.
I got two tanks, a 90 and a 35 gallons, with live rocks and a few corals. Last Friday I removed the rocks, caught all the fish and moved them to a 20G tank. That seemed to be too small for all the fish, the next day I set up a 45G with a large canister filter that had been running on the 90 G, a wet/dry filter and also a small Aqua Clear filter, with two air stone and a heater set at 84 deg. For this QT tank, I don't use RO DI water, just tap + dechlorination as I expected to be changing water very often.
I dosed Cupramine according to the label at 1 ml/10.5 G on last Friday night, then repeated on Sunday night (48 hours) another dose at 1ml/10.5 G. I bought an AP copper test kit, this kit is not easy to read, but that was the only kit my lfs has. The copper was at .5 mg/L as specified in the label.
It took quite a few days for the whilte dots to clear out, yesterday almost all the white dots on the hipo tang vanished. All the fish are still eating, active.
Unfortunately, I think my canister filter somehow got shock because of the sudden bigger bio load, and the QT has been cycling. I've been changing 30% water (exactly 15g) everyday. I make sure 15G I'm changing so I can redose cupramine to the .5 level to maintain the copper in the QT at that level. I think doing water change at 30% everyday is good because it serves two purposes:
1/ Refreshing the water,
2/ Removing some of the floating parasites.
In prepare for the water change, I age the water for 24 hours, put in a heater set at the same temperature as the QT, mix the salt and the medicine, and dechlor. Make sure the water is the same as the QT before changing it.
So far, things seem to go smoothly, my ammonia seems to be going down, and the nitrite is going up, it's at the top of the chart now!!! I can't wait for it to start to go down, maybe another week!
I plan to keep them medicated for another week, and keep my DT tanks fishless for 5, 6 weeks before these guys can go back home.
Here are some pictures:
Last week I found out my some of my fish showing sign of ich, especially the Hipo Tang. He got a lot of white dots on his body, and it seemed to be spreading. At first I treated them with Ick-Attach for 4 days, the symtoms seemed to get worse, so I decided to stop using it, and set up hospital tank and treated them with cupramine instead.
I got two tanks, a 90 and a 35 gallons, with live rocks and a few corals. Last Friday I removed the rocks, caught all the fish and moved them to a 20G tank. That seemed to be too small for all the fish, the next day I set up a 45G with a large canister filter that had been running on the 90 G, a wet/dry filter and also a small Aqua Clear filter, with two air stone and a heater set at 84 deg. For this QT tank, I don't use RO DI water, just tap + dechlorination as I expected to be changing water very often.
I dosed Cupramine according to the label at 1 ml/10.5 G on last Friday night, then repeated on Sunday night (48 hours) another dose at 1ml/10.5 G. I bought an AP copper test kit, this kit is not easy to read, but that was the only kit my lfs has. The copper was at .5 mg/L as specified in the label.
It took quite a few days for the whilte dots to clear out, yesterday almost all the white dots on the hipo tang vanished. All the fish are still eating, active.
Unfortunately, I think my canister filter somehow got shock because of the sudden bigger bio load, and the QT has been cycling. I've been changing 30% water (exactly 15g) everyday. I make sure 15G I'm changing so I can redose cupramine to the .5 level to maintain the copper in the QT at that level. I think doing water change at 30% everyday is good because it serves two purposes:
1/ Refreshing the water,
2/ Removing some of the floating parasites.
In prepare for the water change, I age the water for 24 hours, put in a heater set at the same temperature as the QT, mix the salt and the medicine, and dechlor. Make sure the water is the same as the QT before changing it.
So far, things seem to go smoothly, my ammonia seems to be going down, and the nitrite is going up, it's at the top of the chart now!!! I can't wait for it to start to go down, maybe another week!
I plan to keep them medicated for another week, and keep my DT tanks fishless for 5, 6 weeks before these guys can go back home.
Here are some pictures:
