Treating Ich in a reef

[FocusFin]

Last Thursday, I discovered my Wrasse had a half dozen ich spots. Not wanting to make matters worse, I decided to leave him in the display and since chemical treatment in a reef was not an option I decided to use a nutritional supplement in hopes of boosting his immunity.

I usually use Selcon for food supplement but apparently it's no longer available in Canada so instead I used Brightwell's MaxAmino. I broke my usual daily feeding down into 3 to 4 feedings and added a couple of drops each time to my frozen food letting it soak for an hour or so.

The first video I shot was day 3 and you can see (I hope) by this point the wrasse has dozens of spots and by day 4 it had taken to hiding most of the time and declining to eat. By day 5 however, the fish began coming out for each feeding and then by the morning of day 6, I noticed most of the spots had disappeared.

In the second video (day 7) the fish is virtually clear of the parasite and is swimming and flaring quite happily. The added bonus to this method of treating ich is that each of the other fish have been treated at the same time and are presumably now (more) immune to an outbreak.

While this has done nothing to eliminate ich from my tank, it's at least saved the fish and prevented an outbreak.

Sorry for the links but could not embed without total loss of quality.

Day 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDtupDtiY8Y

Day 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wnM_LUvMFY

[ramblnpony]

I had/have a similar problem with a mel wrasse I bought downtown that brought in the ick. My fault for not quarantining. It spread to my Hippo tang (known to be ick magnets) but after about 7 weeks of supplementing Zoe and zelcon, my weekly 5% water changes and good water parameters, all fish are fat and healthy looking. I know the ich is probably still in the tank but it is not visable on any fish. So far, so good.   

[FocusFin]

It really is amazing what proper nutrition can do when treating fish for disease. I think we often assume that buying quality food means the fish are getting all of the nutrients they need and that may simply not be the case.

[bandit]

We're did you get the max amino

[FocusFin]

Ray's.

I bought it in March and kept it in the fridge but was concerned about expiry so I emailed Brightwell's and they said as long as its refrigerated it won't expire.