Fish are dying. Is this ick disease?

[jwondell]

I have been treating my tank as if it were ick disease for the past
10 days. The conditions of the spots are same as described as ick. I
have photos I took today of my clown fish
http://www.wondellmultimedia.com/Clown1.jpg
http://www.wondellmultimedia.com/Clown2.jpg
*I have live rock and no reefs.
My steps toward fixing the problems:
1st - I add a cleaner shrimp, garlic drops to food and take out the
carbon in the filter = 1 FISH DIES after some 4 days.
2nd - I get ick treatment drops. I don't know the name but it is one
drop per gallon and repeated after 48 hours. I was told to not do a
treatment between 48 hours, and not to do it a 3rd time. Also I
slowly increase the water temp to 78 degrees and decrease the amount
of light to nearly one - two hours a day. Next morning, another FISH
DIES.
3rd - I'm in between treatments so instead of the drops, I vacuum the
tank bed (as I have read to take out some of those parasites sitting
in the sand) and replace the 4 gallons I took out of the 58 gallon
tank while decreasing the salinity to .018. Today, My clown fish is
looking horrible. It isn't very active and I predict will die
today.
What to do? Is this some other disease and I'm trying to treat it as
ick? HELP!

 

[michelle13]

It's hard to tell from your pictures if it is ich, but if it is then hyposalinity is the way to go. I have heard that a lot of the treatments that are out there for ich don't work. I have two fish that are just now coming out of hypo after being in there for over a month. You can find tons of information on this board and on the web on hyposalinty. Basically you have to put the fish in a hospital (QT) tank and lower the salintiy in it. If you do it on your main tank it will kill you live rock and any other inverts. The salinity is lowered to 1.009 over the course of about 2 days. They are kept at this salinity for 4-6 weeks. then over the course of about 4-5 or more days you bring the salinity back up to your main tanks salinity. You would need to read more on it, but that's basically it. It has worked like a charm for me and I would do it again. When I started my clownfish was on the edge of death. I could see the bones in his body and he wouldn't eat. It got that far because I kept treating my tank with ich treatments from the store and unfortunately they never worked. Just my 2 cents!!