Originally Posted by Beth
Old Salt, it applies to hard surfaces, such as invert shells, LR, corals mounted on rocks, etc. One stage of the parasite involves residing on hard surfaces. So, while a snail can not have ich, it can conceivably carry ich.
The easiest way to avoid contamination is to be sure you know where your livestock came from. If a soft coral mounted on rocks is sharing a tank or filters with fish, then that coral's mount rock is suspect. Alternatively, you could QT everything....however, this is sometimes not practical for most hobbyists. Especially attempting to QT corals that require high intensity lighting. Unless, of course, you can equip a QT with expensive lighting.
So far all of my fish come from 4 places, 3 LFS's and SWF.com. I am waiting for my 125 gallon to finish cycling so I can start moving the fish I currently have in a 29 gallon (which is soon to become my QT instead of the 12 gallon nano that I'm using now). The problem is I have several fish (2 fire gobies and a sixline wrasse) in a 46 gallon that I would also like to move so I can tear this tank down and start it over (had the plague hit this tank and lost all my fish except for the 3 mentioned above). I'm afraid to put any new fish in it until I can remove all the contents and thoroughly clean the tank and replace the live sand. I'm just trying to determine if it is ever going to be safe to use the live rock again and whether or not I'll be able to move the remaining fish into my main tank. Should I move them back into a quarantine tank until I can get this one scrubbed?
