Ich!

rach867

ok, so I need some help. We have a 46 gallon bow saltwater tank thats been set up now for about 3 months. once the tank was established we bought a Yellow Tang, a bicolor angel, Naked Clown fish, Perculous Clown fish, purple fire fish, watchmen goby, and a coral beauty. ( not all these fish at the same time) But they have all died to what we think is ICH. We have been treating the tank to get rid of it and once we think its gone...add fish and they die again due to the white spots.
We then bought a quarantine tank, and treated the main tank with kick ich. We treated the quarantine tank with copper and put garlic in the food for both tanks. None of this has seemed to help. I dont know If its in the main tank still, but all along it never effect the Fire fish or the watchmen goby, which we still have.
We put another Coral beauty in the quarantine tank and that also developed Ich, so we treated that with the kick ich, copper and para guard, (all at different times) but the fish still has white spots on one of the fins and all over its tail.

I dont know what to do at this point, Im at a loss.

njudson

If you still have fish in the main tank which it sounds like you do it is probable that ich is still present there. If you want to be fully rid of it for good you would need to let the tank be fish free for 6+ weeks. However it is perfectly normal for a marine tank to have some ich present. You just generally do no see any signs of it because healthy happy well fed fish are able to fight off the parasite on their own and most of the time don't show any signs of ich.

The good news is it seems like you are on the right track because you are QTing your new fish. Keep running your QT at low salinity and use your copper med of choice. What you need to do is slow introduce healthy fish to your display tank. If you keep introducing stressed fish or fish that are not suitable for a 46g (like a tang) you will continue to have ich.

This is a good read if you want some info on marine ich
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-08/sp/index.php