Need help asap.

[Gregsf66]

I went away for 2 days, and my marine betta died in the Tank, Now all of my fish, clown, hawk fish, flame angel, royal gamma have white spots on their body, I check the amonia and it was fine. I also checked the nitrates and they were a little high. What should I do. Im not sure what is wrong w/ them.

besides doing a water change what else is there for me to do. Melafix treatment.


Please help asap.

Greg

[BigKGlen]

Sounds like Ich. Melafix and get garlic into their diet right away.
Are you running a UV sterilizer?

[Gregsf66]

Im curious about this other product,

I treated the Tank w/ melafix last night, Not sure if that will clear up the ich, but worth a try.

but this other product is called "quick cure" It says do not use on baby whales, elephant nose, shrimps, snails, living rock or invertebrates, Does that mean that I have to take all of my fish out and put them in another tank and treat w/ quick cure. Please some one help asap. I have had this tank for about a year now and never had any problems.

3am, IM still up trying to fix the foaming of this product. OMG. I have totally screwed the pootch...... Like I said before I put melafix into the 75 gallon rr setup. Now I have bubbles like crazy on my asm g2 skimmer. Please for the love of god please some one tell me how to fix the ich and stop the bubbles from my skimmer. I have turned off the skimmer for the night until i see a reply on this post. SOME ONE HELP ME ASAP.......................

Greg

[BigKGlen]

If you can, do a 30-50% water change.
Yep. the Melafix will foam like hell, you did right thing by turning the skimmer off.
Do your best to catch the infected fish, and get them into some fresh RODI water at a lower salinity level.
Raise your tank temp SLOWLY to 80-82 degrees.
LAST DITCH effort, do a fresh water dip on any fish you get out of your tank.
Hopes this helps.

Good luck!

[Gregsf66]

I just did a 40% water change before I put the Melafix in. Do i wait a few days for the mela fix to work and then do the water change. Cause if I do a waterchange right now then I will take out all of the melafix. What should I do. IM not comfortable putting the fix in a fresh water . Is the best thing for me to do is setup a quick tank from my garage and treat w/ quick cure, and put all my fish in that tank.

Please let me know thx

Greg

[BigKGlen]

Got your PM, and replied.

[Jeff]

first off melafix will not work and constantly changing the water will cause further stress. if you have a skimmer crank it up and skimm as wet as possible and don't do anymore water changes unless the nitrates or amonia goes up. a u.v. steralizer does not help with the ick other than helping with the water condition. garlic probebly doesn't help other than stimulating the appetite, what you need to do is feed as often as possible and the let the fish immune system take care of it.

[bdls]

Do you even want to add the melafix to your main tank ? I always heard never to add anything to the main tank, if you can the fish and put them in a hospital tank.
My fish had ICK a few weeks ago, Slowly turn up the heat in the tank to about 82-83 and feed lots of garlic. Once the ick is gone slowly start dropping your temp in the to about 79-80.

[caferacermike]

Marine ich is generally not a condition to freak out over. Most readings indicate that it does not usually kill it's host. Garlic is not a medication, I do not understand why so many people think it is. The idea is that the potent smell will induce a feeding response. Eating fish have a good metabolism. The idea is that a healthy eating fish will quickly win the battle over ich by itself. If you don't have a ton of SPS you can definitely raise the temp higher. I believe the proper temp is above 84F to help speed up the metabolism of the ich parasite. You speed up the cycle from egg, larva and finally fish parasite. Many good "organic" methods include raising the temp, lowering the salinity (can cause fish to shed their slime coat more often helping to rid of the parasite faster), and small feedings as often as possible. Other methods that add to this are indeed over skimming, UV (helps to kill swimming larva and prevent it from happening again), Ozone (same as UV), quarantine tank to treat with copper (what your Kwik Kure is, don't add this to your tank), and freshwater dips (same idea of shedding the slime coat). I'd do daily water changes of about 5-10% not huge changes of 40-50% right now as the fish are stressed. The hope with water changes is to keep the parameters squeaky clean and to remove ich larva. Panicking and just adding things to the tank will keep you awake all night mopping the floors as you've found.

Nobody has yet mentioned that the parasite needs about 6 weeks to "cure" itself. The best cure is to keep the fish in quarantine for 6 weeks while there are no fish for the parasite to host to. This will generally "unlock" the cycle. However you may need to keep the fish out of the display even longer, you want to see them clean and spot free for at least 4-6 weeks to make sure you do not re-introduce the bug. Keep in mind that it is often said that ich is the herpes of fish keeping, about 90% of the fish harbor the bug at all times but it only shows when there are signs of stress. My guess would be that something was awry in the tank before you left, whatever it was may have been stressing the fish, the cycle started, whatever the stress was killed the betta, the rest of the fish show signs of ich because the cycle had time to hatch, swim and attach to the compromised fish. It may seem like it all happened the 2 days you were gone but I feel that is unlikely to have that large an outbreak in 2 days. Once you get the tank back to "normal" keep up with regular water changes, water testing, quality feedings, quarantining of new fish, and possibly add a UV sterilizer to help prevent this from happening again. Keep in mind that UV is not the magic bullet here, many claim it does everything from preventing ich, killing algae to folding shirts, it may help lessen the chances of an outbreak and may slow the spread of algae.

[erikharrison]

dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggg Mike nailed it.

[Bill S]

Greg,

Very sorry about your loss. I sincerely hope everything will turn out OK.

If you had used the SEARCH function we have here, you would have quickly found a solution to your problem, that would NOT have led to your panic at 2:50 am.

As several of the more seasoned posters above have indicated, EXCEPT for the death of your fish and the resulting chemistry problems, the Ich should not be a huge deal.

At this point, the solution is to try and minimize the stress on your fish, and fix your chemistry problems.

[reeferRob]

first off melafix will not work and constantly changing the water will cause further stress. if you have a skimmer crank it up and skimm as wet as possible and don't do anymore water changes unless the nitrates or amonia goes up. a u.v. steralizer does not help with the ick other than helping with the water condition. garlic probebly doesn't help other than stimulating the appetite, what you need to do is feed as often as possible and the let the fish immune system take care of it.

I agree!

[Fish4life]

ya, what they said. I've never been a big fan of putting any chemicals in the tank, even if the fish are sick. I have to again stress the importance of a QT tank. IMO proactive approach > reactive approach.

[caferacermike]

dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggg Mike nailed it.

Erik I think there is something wrong with your keyboard. I have an extra I can send you. lol.

[erikharrison]

lol! --Are you also referring to the ftsssssssssssssssssssss?-- lol!

[Bill S]

Update???

[Gregsf66]

I took my fish out (the ones that I can catch and put them in my 14g empty biocube. They are looking a litle bit better, but I guess I have to wait the full 3 days for the quick cure to kick in. Any ways, I did a water change and got rid of the melafix and turned my skimmer back on. Nitrates are at 3 to 5 and Ammonia is at 0. Fish are eating pretty good. Thx guys and gals for all of your information about how to fix the sickness.

As far as the temp of the tank it is at 74 right now and will go between 74 and 76, should I start raising the main tank up to 80 to 82? And what temp should the hospital tank be at?


Greg

[BIGBIRD123]

Nice post there Mike...I'm depressed....er...impressed.

S

[caferacermike]

It's 84f if you want to break the cycle. Your goal by increasing the temp is to force a hypermetabolic rate in the egg form to get them to hatch faster. Once they hatch and cannot find a host, or are exposed to a treatment, they will die and cannot resume the cycle causing yet more eggs. If there are any fish left in the tank that could be affected by ich yet again you won't break the cycle as they will have a host to breed upon yet once more. However removing as many fish as possible will lessen the available host space and will at least lower the amount of the parasite living in the aquarium. DO NOT JUST TOSS THE TREATED FISH BACK INTO THE TANK AFTER THE 3-4 DAYS OF TREATMENT. Doing so will only allow the free swimming larva and/or yet unhatched eggs to once again establish themselves on your fish, leading you full circle back to where you started. If it was as bad as you said it was, you should allow the entire time for breaking the chain. This could be 3 weeks to several months. It depends upon how long you can leave the tank without any fish (from this point 4 weeks is a good start) or at least 3 weeks after you haven't seen any spots on the remaining display fishes.

[Gregsf66]

Ok the Hospital tank is at 83.6 and the Host tank is at 75, Im going to buy a heater for the host tank. I will get that up to 84, but the only question that I have is what about all of my soft corals, frogspawn,flower annomee, about 30 differnt types of zoos, green star poloys, mushrooms, and all of the Live rock, Having the Tank that high will not harm them correct?

Greg

[Bill S]

Greg,

You are absolutely free to do as you please. BUT.

If you re-read the above posts, you'll see that much of what you are doing isn't really being recommended. If you read between the lines, the answers to your posts are basically: "...well, if that's what you want to do, then do this...".

The way I see, you had a large fish die, and your tank started to crash. This freaked your other fish out, and they got ich.

The solution that -I- would use, is simple: Fix your chemistry problems, feed your fish WELL, and do regular water changes to keep nitrates down. Happy fish = no ich. It's THAT simple. Frankly, I wouldn't use Melafix or Quick Cure on a bet. But then, what the heck. I've only been keeping SW fish for 35 years.

BTW, while it's primarily SPS that won't survive the high temps, other corals aren't particularly fond if it either. That being said, my tank occasionally gets to 83...

[erikharrison]

Since you are heating the tank, please do it slowly. You don't want the anemone releasing nasties in your tank, or worse, dying. Run some carbon! IMO treating your display with "reef safe" chemicals is just not good practice. "Take care of the water and the fish will take care of themsleves." That's MissT's quote, and your fish will live and die by it.

[JimD]

"Since you are heating the tank, please do it slowly. You don't want the anemone releasing nasties in your tank"

Hmmm, thats interesting, have you run accross any documentation indicating that there is a correlation between the two?? The reason I ask is because I recently encountered an event where my anemone released you know what into the water and at the same time I noticed that my heater malfunctioned causing the temp to get up to around 87 or so degrees, I really didnt think anything of it till now... Any info would be cool...

[crossxfire2]

I once had a hippo tang who got a case of ich. I put him in a huge bowl of dechlorinated freshwater for about 4 minutes. It did the trick, but he didn't have a SEVERE case, it was only mild. But it still worked! No lies.

[Bill S]

Did the dip work, or would it have recovered just fine on his/her own??? You'll never know for sure!

[crossxfire2]

Did the dip work, or would it have recovered just fine on his/her own??? You'll never know for sure!

You could be right! And I will never know for sure! haha

[copperband]

i have a cleaner shrimp that cleans my fish and i just got a coral banded shrimp so now i got to cleaners try cleaner shrimp and stuff like that

[erikharrison]

"Since you are heating the tank, please do it slowly. You don't want the anemone releasing nasties in your tank"

Hmmm, thats interesting, have you run accross any documentation indicating that there is a correlation between the two?? The reason I ask is because I recently encountered an event where my anemone released you know what into the water and at the same time I noticed that my heater malfunctioned causing the temp to get up to around 87 or so degrees, I really didnt think anything of it till now... Any info would be cool...

Honestly, no I don't. I just figured that since anemones are pretty sensitive to changes, so it would be a much higher probability of it occuring. I assume this because I am sure that in nature they at some point release their toxins anyway. This would just help that to happen.