Ich / Ick i cant get rid of the ick!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, Here comes the bombardment of questions. Brace yourself!
>water paramaters? (ex. ph, ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, gh, kh)
>Any photos of the "ick"?
>What are you using regularly in the tank (ex. Plant additives, Dechlorinator, etc)
>Temp water is kept at (does it fluxuate)?
>Filtration used?
>current inhabitants?
>Is the tank near a airconditioner, heater, or draft/heat source that can be causing un-noticed fluxuation?

 

IME too much flourish excel can kill fish.....I overdosed a tank once and lost half my colony of cyno afra cobue. Are the fish covered with white spots that look like grains of salt?

 

Did you read this thread on ich ?
Understand Ich and Cure Your Fish

I see above you mention the tank temp is 82-84. For temp to be a factor it must be 86+ to have any positive effect on the ich.

 

Never trust the test strips...I've learned the hard way using them (used to use the api freshwater multi ones)...now using api liquid test kits. I was truly amazed by how much the strips were off by!

As for the plant chemicals I must admit that I've always done a tad past the recommendation for the flourish chems...and right now I use them all and never had any issues. I'm using flourish iron, flourish, flourish excel, flourish potassium, flourish trace, flourish nitrogen, flourish phosphorus per Seachems online dose chart schedule.

As for the carbon, always remove carbon when medicating a tank (the carbon will remove the meds defeating the purpose of medicating in the first place).

If were talking MINIMAL fluxuation on the temp then that shouldn't be an issue...if were talking by several degrees one way or the other or a very fast fluxuation then this may be an issue causing stress which can obviously lead to disease such as ich.

Cloudy water: What are you feeding? (overfeeding possibly?)...what type of lighting are you running and how long are you running it.

Filtration is recommended at 4-5x your gph. Not sure where you are on yours.

<is waiting on the photo

 

I would increase the tank temp to 86-87 and the next day vacuum the substrate really well. Keep the tank temp up according to the thread I posted above.

 

Wow, that's defin. pretty bad! It's hard to tell from the picts but it is grainy like salt...correct? (NOT fuzzy like tufts...right)

What medicine have you used thus far?

If this was my tank I'd do the following:

I've used QUICK CURE in the past. Your already within the products temp. range (80F)...IF you haven't used it do a partial (25%)...add the medicine per instructions...and dose for a minimum of 3 consecutive days. ((when I did this my lfs told me to remove all of my filter media, which I was shaky on doing...but it did get rid of the problem ich I had at that time)) and after all the ich was gone I added this instant tank cycle stuff, new media for all my filtration, and this media innoculator gel like stuff that was supposed to give your media a beneficial bacteria jumpstart.

 

There are already ich meds in the tank. I wouldn't add a different one until several water changes were performed.

 

are you sure? to me it sounded like methods were tried and partials were done (I was assuming the water was changed out enough at this point that the meds were already removed).

As Anthony stated...have you done several water changes to remove the current treatments up to this point?

 

Nope not sure, just assuming since they said they were using it.

 

I would throw in some garlic enhanced food as well

 

yea thats pretty bad. personally depending on how much fish you have i would put them in a bare bottom tank (smaller tank) and dose more acuratly and you can do more water changes. bumping the temp up helps but it doesnt kill the ick it just fastens up their cycle/life span good luck but loaches when they are covered that bad in ick its pretty serious....

 

Actually when the temp is 86+ it does kill the ich.

 

i heard it speeds up the procecess of their life but you the owner of this site so mines is [bs] lol jk hes probally right

 

Higher temps do speed up the ich cycle but if you get high enough it does destroy the ich when it gets to a certain stage.

 

well yea thats what i ment i think it destroys it when the egg/babies fall of the fish and are ready to attach itself to a new fish i tt dies or something like that

 

hows it going?

 

Agreed with Anthony... Temp over 86 will speed up the lifecycle and end that problem!