Any suggestions

[norm]

I have a 46 bow front, I started cycle with 5 clowns and some hermit crabs. I think that one came with ick "*****" my bad. My cycle is not over with. Ammonia at .025 Nitrite at 1.00. 3 of the Clowns got so bad that I moved them to a 15 Gal HT low Salinity .019 and using copper treatment. I have started noticing the other two clowns also being affected but not as bad should I moved them the HT and will my main tank not finish the cycle? Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks in advanced.

 

[twoods71]

When you made the choice to cycle with clowns you pretty much made the choice to sacrifice them to the cycle.
I am not saying you did anything wrong but rather saying that the ick may have been brought on or encouraged by the stress of the cycle.
Also if you remove the fish from the tank you will remove the ammonia source and the cycle will stop.

 

[twoods71]

Also for the ick you can try feeding your fish frozen food soaked in garlic oil/juice. It has worked for me and several others on this board.

 

[norm]

So your saying that I should keep the two clowns till the cycle is complete no matter what? What if fish die before cycle?

 

[twoods71]

What I was saying is that if you remove the fish the cycle will stop and actually the "good" bacteria will start to die with no ammonia source.
The choice of what to do is up to you.
If it was me I would leave the fish in the main tank and feed the garlic soaked food.
There are other methods for cycling a tank including using raw shrimp.
You can search this board for more info on that.

 

[norm]

From my understanding ich will live in the tank if it has a host fish. Even if I treat the fish in the tank the ich will still be thier and would attack any new fish I introduce. Does this sound right?

 

[twoods71]

ich can only live in a tank without a host for up to 21 days.
From my experience the garlic made the ick fall off the fish after 3 days.
This means that after I started the garlic treatment it took a total of 24 days for the parasite to die.
I feed the fish the garlic soaked food twice a day.
Do a search for garlic and you can get much more info on this topic.

 

[norm]

Thanks for the info I will keep on feeding garlic soaked food.