Ich in a reef>>>>>>>>>>>

[ratrod]

I've had a reef almost 15 years, but made an elementary mistake. I added a naso tang to my 252g reef. The naso apeared in perfect shape. within 2-3 day my yellow eye tank was plastered in ich then my yellow tang and the naso got it. The other tangs were in perfect health. The yellow eye died and a week later the naso died. It looks like the yellow may make it. My mistake obviously was not quarentene the naso.......so here's my question that noone seems to know. The ich parasite is something that exsists in the tank and can be brought on by stress or other conditions or deos ich have to be introduce into the tank. If it doesnt exsist in the tank, then how long after the fish are taken out of the reef would it be safe to introduce new fish. Quarentene a large fish is not always real convenent,,,what other solutions are there? Thanks

 

[6stokes]

Check this thread out. I think it will give you your answers. https://forums.saltwaterfish.com/vb/s...1#post914831It

 

[nycbob]

ick parasite has to be introduced into the tank. qt is the only way to prevent ick from entering into ur display tank. if u leave ur tank fishless for 4-6 weeks, ick parasite wont come back since it wouldnt be find a host to latch on during part of its life cycle.

 

[king_neptune]

I did mine 10 weeks to be safe. 99.9% chance your going ot be fine with a 6 week treatment. But just to be safe, I wanted to squash it once and for all.
The real problem for me was getting the engineer gobies out of the tank. to do that, I had to drain my 125 down to about 3 inches of water, and remove all the rocks.
There are reef safe medications that supposedly work. I tried one...unfortunately it had a misleading package. It claimed that it would treat 1000 gallons of water. What it didnt say, was you had to give your tank a treatment every day for up to a week after the last sign of ich(with 180g total volume, I got 5 treatments....which fell WAY WAY short of what was needed). In short, i ran out of the product LONG before the ich treatment was done. $40 down the drain. If I woulda purchased 3-4 more bottles of the medication, then I would have been ok.
The cheaper, sure fire method is remove all the fish from the tank. ICH cant survive on inverts, so it will die off with no fish in the DT. And with the fish in a bare hospital tank, the ICH has no sand or LR to return to in its final stages. So it will die in the Hospital tank as well. The whole process takes about 6 weeks. But there have been some lab cases where the parasite lasted 70days. Thats why I did mine for 10 weeks. I wanted to be absolutely sure.