Damn Ick...

[zee119]

well my new tang is got about 12 spots of ick, it is still eating really well, so i'm not feeling as though all is lost ...i'm going to the lfs to get 2 neon gobys..mabey they can help. ick is the only real downfall of keeping a reef tank.

[RyanG]

Dont add more fish to an already sick tank, thats just acking for trouble IMO. Get your problem resolved before you add to it. How long has the tang been in your tank? and sick for that matter.

[cthegame]

As long as he is eating, let him be. Tangs are very prone to ich and these little ich outbursts are fairly common. My yellow tang went thru a lot of them in the beginning until he really started to feel at home in my tank. It takes a while.

Ryan is correct, dont buy any new fish but you can get a fire shrimp. The tang will probably go for a cleaning session and the fire shrimp will pick off the ich from his body.

[zee119]

he's been here for 3 days and i just noticed at 8 pm....

[RyanG]

stress=ich in tangs

[d.french]

been there also lost powder brown out of blue, feed garlic. i soak algae sheets in jar of minced garlic and feed minced garlic with frozen food. So far is helping me save my foxface.

[d.french]

i also have a neon gobie, cleaner wrasse, and 2 cleaner shrimp to help out since all of them clean fish.

[Bifferwine]

I'd go with a pair of cleaner shrimp over the goby, if you can. Do you have any shrimp already?

[Altohombre]

from what I saw my cleaner shrimps haven't paid attention to my midas blenny with ich at all. Luckily the ich seems to be going away almost fully.

[Damseluver]

Cleaners will have little to no effect on the situation. Like was said stop adding fish to the tank.

Your options are limited here. Roll with the punches and don't add any thing fish wise to this tank that your not willing to lose.

Or pull all fish from the tank and let it go fish-less for six weeks. Ich is an obligate parasite and with no fish to suck blood off of will die off. Stress is not a factor here either.
A completely stressed fish will not get ick if the parasite does not already reside in the tank or had the parasite before introduction to the tank.

You can attempt home treatment on the all the fish you have but if it were me I would return all fish to LFS and demand some sort of store credit.

While your reef goes fish-less cycle a QT tank. Should take about 17 days. QT all new fish going into reef for a least a few weeks. If fish show sings of parasites while in QT hypo treatment where tangs and angles are concerned. All other species should do fine with copper treatment.

The majority of LFS will either run copper willy nilly that cause internal damage to most tangs and some angels (fish will seem healthy for a period of months and then mysteriously stop eating and waste away; likely cause liver damage from high copper exposure) or run nothing in which case parasite exposure is almost a certainty. It is a rare LFS that will take the necessary steps to assure parasite free holding tanks without causing copper exposure damage to the more sensitive species.

Cycling/qt/treatment time should coincide roughly with the the reefs fish-less period so you should be ready to add parasite free fish to your parasite free reef in exactly six weeks. Then of course any new additions to the tank includeing rock and coral will also require a QT. Cross contamination from treatment to DT is also a concern. Use seperate rooms nets and equipment and wash and dry hand after fiddleing around in the treatment tank.

Is all of this a time consuming pain in the *ss? Most definitely. That's why where reef tanks are concerned I go with option one and don't add anything fish wise that I am not willing to lose.

Toss in some damsels pack it with inverts and corals and don't bother worrying about it. The reefs water quality concerns will also diminish absent any heavy fish load to deal with. But then again that's just me; I could be wrong.