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566 Posts
I am not going to lie. I typically buy my fish from petsmart or petco. I know I shouldn’t, but I have never had an issue. However, to round out a school of rummynose in my 15 gallon and a school of blue eyed fork tails in my 20L, I decided to be responsible and bought one of each from my LFS. Got ick in both of my tanks, one about a week after the other (was very pissed at my LFS).
I spotted ick in my 15 first. With my 15, I decided to go the heat raising route. Both of my tanks are set to 73f. I slowly raised the temp to about 84 over the course of 24 hours, no problem. Then, when I went up to about 86-87, havoc. I lost 2 rummys within 2 hours and 2 more over night. All of my crypts started to melt. I then put the remaining 4 in a quarantine tank. Now they are better and back in the 15, no additional losses. I will never do heat treatment again.
For the 20, I was very worried about the plants. This tank is medium tech and I finally got the tank to where I wanted. There was no way I was doing the heat treatment and losing plants. I have a lot of small fish and catching them would have required me to rip the tank apart. So, against my better judgment and my research about ick, I decided to do……wait for it……NOTHING. I do big water changes anyway and I was hoping that would be enough. About half of the fish were showing sign of the disease at one point. Now, after a few weeks, none of them do. Casualties 0.
I am not saying this is the way to go or the right thing to do. I know this is totally anecdotal. Maybe the rummys are just ultra sensitive. I may not even totally be in the clear, but I wanted to share my findings that keeping good water conditions in an infected tank seems to be a big factor in preventing AND curing disease. And in my case, it seemed to be enough to rid my tank of the disease.
I spotted ick in my 15 first. With my 15, I decided to go the heat raising route. Both of my tanks are set to 73f. I slowly raised the temp to about 84 over the course of 24 hours, no problem. Then, when I went up to about 86-87, havoc. I lost 2 rummys within 2 hours and 2 more over night. All of my crypts started to melt. I then put the remaining 4 in a quarantine tank. Now they are better and back in the 15, no additional losses. I will never do heat treatment again.
For the 20, I was very worried about the plants. This tank is medium tech and I finally got the tank to where I wanted. There was no way I was doing the heat treatment and losing plants. I have a lot of small fish and catching them would have required me to rip the tank apart. So, against my better judgment and my research about ick, I decided to do……wait for it……NOTHING. I do big water changes anyway and I was hoping that would be enough. About half of the fish were showing sign of the disease at one point. Now, after a few weeks, none of them do. Casualties 0.
I am not saying this is the way to go or the right thing to do. I know this is totally anecdotal. Maybe the rummys are just ultra sensitive. I may not even totally be in the clear, but I wanted to share my findings that keeping good water conditions in an infected tank seems to be a big factor in preventing AND curing disease. And in my case, it seemed to be enough to rid my tank of the disease.
