Participate in the "ALL FISH HAVE ICH" fact or theory thread

[Triggerfish]

this thread started from of all places, current months RC TOTM thread.

i know there are some proponents in this group that agree and think it's fact. ..if you wish, please post your support of this fact with your experimental findings as well as any references you have located that supports those facts in that thread..

perhaps we can all learn something more.
thread found here...
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=7701594#post7701594

 

[JohnK]

I'm solidly in the "Ick can be eradicated camp". My exp is covered in the "quest" thread.

Hypo and fallow has seemed to work for me. Haven't seen an outbreak on over 200 days since threatment. That said, I don't doubt that there are different crypto strains that are more and less easy to fight.

(bump)

 

[smcnally]

I am a firm believer that it is always somewhat present in your tank and shows during times of stress. FWIW, I've only had a small bought with ich in my tank once in 1.5 years.

 

[JohnK]

There are a lot of different understandings - hard to say what is right or wrong?

I only know my own exp, and I may be interpeting it inaccurately, but it seems to point in one direction for me.

 

[zemuron114]

I believe ICH is always present. I do not think there is a way to completely eradicte it. You could QT a fish for months on end and keep a fallow tank for months on end, and if you introduce the fish in QT and it gets sick for some reason, that fish will get ich. just my thoughts

 

[JohnK]

It is a parisite, it has a life cycle. How long can is last dormant? No one's
100% sure?????

 

[Triggerfish]

i'm not debating this topic here..too much to cover to attempt and explain..only thing i'll say here is ..."good thing for science"...

 

[JayM]

I know that since I went hypo for 5 weeks in my main tank, I have not seen any, and ANY new critters get 4 weeks of QT.

 

[Matt L.]

I started a thread on this a few weeks ago, to eventually serve as a sticky.

The short story is: all fish will have Ich unless you break the lifecycle. Ich just doesn't materialize out of the ether.

You can eradicate Ich, but you need to remive all hosts from your tank and quarentine the tank for 6-8 weeks without fish while treating the fish in a hyposaline environment. At the conclusion of that treatment, anything from a living system added to the tank must be quarentined appropriately, either without fish or in hyposalinity of a fish, for 6-8 weeks.

I wish we could move this discussion to the thread I started to best incorporate everyones' opinions into what I hope to be the Ich information sticky.

Matt

 

[Nocturnal]

I started a thread on this a few weeks ago, to eventually serve as a sticky.

The short story is: all fish will have Ich unless you break the lifecycle. Ich just doesn't materialize out of the ether.

You can eradicate Ich, but you need to remive all hosts from your tank and quarentine the tank for 6-8 weeks without fish while treating the fish in a hyposaline environment. At the conclusion of that treatment, anything from a living system added to the tank must be quarentined appropriately, either without fish or in hyposalinity of a fish, for 6-8 weeks.

I wish we could move this discussion to the thread I started to best incorporate everyones' opinions into what I hope to be the Ich information sticky.

Matt

YES!!


I had an episode where a fish I bought brought in Ich. I hypoed the tank for 3 months, actually it may have been longer. Regardless, I never had a problem again. Break the cycle, ich is gone forever, unless you reintroduce it to the tank.

 

[marco67]

I think it would be more accurate to say "All Tanks Have Ich"
and all fish therefore have the potiential to get ich if stressed.

 

[Nocturnal]

I think it would be more accurate to say "All Tanks Have Ich"
and all fish therefore have the potiential to get ich if stressed.

...if the tank had ich introduced to it.



If you take an empty tank, add store bought sand, mix up salt water and add it, you can't have ich...impossible. If you add an organism, such as a fish without quaratining it, well, then you have the possibilty of now having it.


Example: Right now, Moe does not have ich in his tank, he only has the potential for it.

 

[Reef55]

Its not just fish that you need to quarantine from then on... every last addition to your tank needs to be QT'd for 6-8 weeks without fish to break the cycle. Corals, live sand from other tanks, live rock, snails, hermit crabs, etc. For those that have claimed they QT'd all incoming fish, did you do the same for the other items? If not, better believe that some of the cysts from ich came into your system then. Most likely though, just like all the airborne parasites we are exposed to, your fish just fought it off and didn't get sick from it. That does not mean that it doesn't exist in your tank though.

 

[marco67]

In theory yes, but in practice, very unlikely. Unless you QT everything. Every single thing that goes into the tank, that means sand, rock, snails, crabs, every coral, every fish ...etc and that's also to assume no cross contamination from shared nets, buckets, frag bags, specimen containers etc ..
Using Moe as an example; OK ...the tank was started with dry rock, RO/DI water and salt ...but there needed to be some rock or sand to seed with. Moe what was your QT protocol on that?

Once again in theory it works, in practice, I've not yet seen a husbandry protocol tight enough to claim "ich free".
On the other hand I have seen many a system outbreak free. My home system for example, 3 years without an outbreak but I know it's in there because 3 years ago during some remodeling my powder brown was stressed and looked like hell.
Marc

 

[marco67]

LOL oops Mark types faster than Marc
Marc

 

[Triggerfish]

Yes Matt, we should post in your thread and get it going for reference here.

This thread was intended to only be a reference to the location of the discussion on RC.
if ya have some info..get in there and start picking the posts apart. i've got numerous outstanding questions to folks over there and probably nothing will be answered that makes any sense.
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=880895

If we could close this one up now that would be best.

 

[NateHanson]

I don't see the options so much being "all tanks have ich" versus "only tanks that were'nt QT'd have ich" because obviously a tank like moe's (or a new dry tank on the showroom floor) doesn't have ich in it.

The more relevant question to me is whether it's really possible to keep a tank in that "showroom clean" parasite condition after you've stocked it. I just think it's rediculously unlikely, to the point of not worth trying. Is anyone really prepared to not just hypo all fish, but quarantine all rock, corals, inverts, etc etc etc, for 4 weeks before adding it to the tank? And you can't do it in a system that has new stuff coming in. Everything in the quarantine has to be there for 4 weeks or more before anything can be removed. Everytime you add a new aquisition the clock is reset to zero weeks.

As for the anecdotal evidence of people who hypo'd their systems, and haven't seen any visible ich outbreaks since, I think there are probably many more systems which haven't been hypo'd since the last outbreak, and which have had no visible ich outbreaks for years since. So just because you hypo'd, it's not necessarily true that there's a causal relationship between that treatment and subsequent years of ich-free bliss. (It's like Homer's anti-Bear rock. )

My tank had an ich problem 3 years ago, we did nothing but use kick ich, improve husbandry, and then for the rest of the time I had the tank running there was never a spot of ich. I think the lack of ich outbreaks is more a sign of good husbandry than proof that a tank is "ich-sterile".

 

[marco67]

Another thing to note is that the introduction of a new fish can often be the precipitating event that brings down the natural defenses in other fish. So when you introduce that new fish from your favorite LFS and your mr hippo tang shows some sugar coating two days later, it's not to say that the new fish was carrying the Ich.
Marc

 

[NateHanson]

LOL oops Mark types faster than Marc
Marc

oops! both of you type faster than Nate who stopped in the middle of typing to put Lilja to bed. Great minds yada yada . . . ah, who are we kidding?

 

[Triggerfish]

this topic looks like it will get more action on this site.
Matt- we can work on your thread for more scientifically documented c.irritan information.
all questions will be part of a quest to understand what you're talking about as well as shed some light on the documented scientific understanding of the c.irritan lifecycle.
we'll start here:

I am a firm believer that it is always somewhat present in your tank and shows during times of stress.

can you elaborate on the "show" part of the parasite lifecycle and how you relate that to your experience? are you perhaps saying that the parasite can have a dormant life that will attack when the temp drops by a predetermined amount.. does it get mad and attacks to feed on a fish? or is it happy b/c the temp changed and decides it's hungry and wants to reproduce? or what?

Also where is it "always somewhat present in the tank"? on the fish, rocks, all over?