Hypo Question

[brenner_jeff]

One of my friends tanks has developed Ich. We decided to go with hypo as many people do. The temp is at 80 and the SG is at 1.009. It has been that way for almost 2 days, I was wondering how long should it take for all the dots to disapear, so far many of the fish look much better however the flame angel still has some. I plan to keep it at 1.009 for 3 weeks after the last dot goes away but I was just curious about how long I should wait to see them disapear.

 

[musipilot]

To be absolutely sure, no doubt, no ich, no problem...wait 45 days from the FIRST day of 1.009 to begin raising salinity.
In a paper I recently read about the life cycle of the ich parasite, the longest recorded life span (without a host) was 4 days, and the longest recorded life span in 1.010 water (which is what they used) was 44 days. The average is 18.
Remember to bring the SG back slowly, much slower than you lower it.
Take a week.

 

[musipilot]

Anthem, these were new to me also, but the source was reliable, and I adjusted my thinking based on them.
These came from Dr. Floyd Crista, he's a marine biologist at the Sea Aquarium in Riverhead, NY.
When we were there we got into a discussion about ich, and he handed me these research papers, the one in question done as a thesis by a graduate student based on his research.
Bottom line is, the two times I've done hypo, and waited 45 days, I never had a reoccurance of ich in either tank.
One thing I forgot to mention, the experiments were apparantly done at 78 degrees F, to simulate a marine home aquarium.

 

[musipilot]

Ah...I see. What I left out was, the 44 day trial was WITH host fish. Without host fish the ich parasite was gone in 6 hours in hyposaline water (1.010)