1) No natural predator has been shown to "eat" or otherwise impact populations of ich, at least not in any study I've seen or heard about. Not cleaner shrimp, not neon gobies...nothing. The stomach contents of various popular "cleaner" livestock have been examined ich doesn't seem to be on the menu.
That said, it is possible that "cleaner" livestock may provide some other benefit to infected fish which in turn helps the fish naturally protect itself.
2) Kick-ich and many other similar products claim to work by increasing the production of the natural mucous lining of fish. The claim is that ich has difficulty breaking through this layer. Many of these products are based on commonly available pepper-based ingrediants.
I'm not aware of any scientific study that shows the efficacy of any of these products. That said, I'm also not aware of any studies that show that any/all of these products don't work. If you do any significant research on Kick-ich you will find many people that believe it helped them irradicate ich. As we've seen here, you'll also find a lot of people that don't believe it did anything other than sap cash from their wallet.
Personally, I'm inclined to think the product, and similar variations, actually can work/help but that's just a gut feeling. I don't think anybody will be able to definitely say much of anything about these products efficacy because nobody is going to spend the money to do so. Many people far more expert than I feel the benefits of these products are dubious at best.
3) Ich has a well-known lifecycle. The only two proven methods to get rid of it are copper and hypo-salinity treatments. Both of those have downsides and are also often not successful as they are very harsh treatments and often times treatment is simply applied to late to help or the treatment is applied incorrectly.
4) Garlic, home remedies are also popular treatments for ich. Garlic is believed to improve the immune response system, not just in fish, but in many creatures including us. Whether or not that holds water who really knows. Many people believe garlic works in the same way that the pepper-based products work, by making the fish produce more mucous. Again, I couldn't find any scientific studies that showed the efficacy of garlic or any of the other common home remedies.
5) UV. As has already been mentioned, UV has been shown to be fairly ineffective at eliminating ich from a tank. UV indescriminantly kills all the life in the water that passes over the lamp -- only the water passing through the UV system is processed. It can be quite effective at preventing ich from tranferring to a 2nd tank from the first.
That said, it is possible that UV could reduce the ich population sufficiently to allow the fish's natural immune response to contain the infestation.
6) Temperature. Studies have shown that temperature variation isn't going to stop ich. While raising the temperature can speed up the lifecycle, it isn't going to kill ich.
The bottom line is that you have two options to rid your tank of ich (and yes, I mean 100% ich free)...copper and hypo. You also have several options that may or may not help your battle with ich.
In my case, neither has yet been a reasonable option (my system is too large; I would need way too big a QT tank or way to many QT tanks). I've been lucky and haven't lost anything to ich but I have ich in my tank for sure; my Tangs occassionally have spots. I've had several (once or twice a year) "outbreaks"; never horrifically bad, but not pleasant either. In every case, for whatever reason, it has subsided. I've used garlic but have no real opinion on whether or not that helped. Some of my fish like garlic and I don't believe it hurts, so I continue to feed it on occassion.
If I were to have a really bad outbreak again, I would probably consider using kick-ich unless I could find a way to do hypo, which would be my #1 choice.
) Did they appear to eat any of the ich
). It's worth a shot if it doesn't harm your corals, clams, inverts, etc..Which it didn't in my case. Also, try to find the reason for the stress on the fish. Whether it be other aggressive tankmates, poor water quality etc..I added way too many fish to a new tank and that was my reason. I have a 40watt UV sterilizer you can borrow till you get yours in. I bought it when i was treating with ich but never used it after a couple weeks with Kick-ich. Good luck....
