Blue Tang - ICH?

[duijver]

Hey Guys,

I picked up a blue tang tonight and as I was dripping it I noticed a few small dots on it. I tried to take some pictures, but they are not great. I was about to put it into my DT, but I stopped short and put it into my small QT instead. It's pretty stressed out so maybe that's all it is?

These pics are not cropped and the white spots are not lens dust - that's the thing is question.

Thanks!

 

[redfishbluefish]

To quote the website on info about Blue Tangs:

"It sounds silly, but this a fish that seems to break out with ich if you even look at it the wrong way."


You got ich!

 

[calaxa]

Looks suspicious to me. I would say that is ich. That's why you should quarantine all fish.

USUALLY, ich will NOT wipe out a tank but any time a fish gets stressed he will probably outbreak with it. Vicious cycle that eventually can cause the tank wipe. Even if you cure him, I hope you are not harboring ich in the tank on someone else. What will you use to treat?

 

[duijver]

Thanks guys.

Well, my QT is currently setup as a future mantis tank so chems are probably out. I have a 4" DSB and about 10lbs of live rock, so I think my own choice is Hyposalinity. If I remember correctly .. inverts are stressed with hyposalinity, but is LR, fans, etc normally fine with Hyposalinity?

By the way, this is a great article about marine ICH - http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forums/fish-diseases-treatments/23132-marine-ich-myths-facts.html

 

[calaxa]

That LR and LS won't be very live after. You will also have a vicious cycle to the tank when you lower the salinity as everything dies off. It's best to use a different type of filter (ie bioballs, sponge filter, etc.) I used LR and basically needed to dump tons of amquel/amquel+ and do massive water changes. Now my LR is free of life (except for the bacteria). All inverts will eventually die in hypo needed to kill ich.

 

[duijver]

That's what I was afraid of. The 10g tank is really new though (5 days old). I'm not really convinced that the sand was live sand since there was no water in it... I took the rubble rock out of my converted wet/dry sump/refum and put it into the tank. There are pods, ants, etc in the water and a few filter feeders on the rocks. I saw some worms and stuff as well. But, since you mentioned that the bacteria will live through this I probably won't have a huge spike? Everything's read 0 (nit,ammon,etc) since I started the tank so technically it may have never "cycled". But, I have had a little crab (LFS sold it as a red crab..) in the tank for 2 days now and it's still kicking.

 

[calaxa]

You have some of the bacteria. All those things you mentioned.....pods, worms, filter feeders, etc. will die very suddenly and there will be a vicious cycle. The bacteria won't be able to compensate for awhile. 10G is also tough. You'll have big pH drops. I saw my ammonia rise to about 2ppm (well using a Nessler based reagent so it shows all Nitrogen including those locked up by amquel). This is in a 120G. So you can imagine how much more ammonia ppm will be in a 10G. Of course after the ammonia, there is the nitrite. Snails, hermits will live until about 1.015 SG. After that, they die too.