[mrarkus]

I have 6 platys in my new 29 gallon aquarium. Everything has been going great until I got ich... That was about 4 days ago. I put a container of marine salt recommended by my store, and Ich Guard with a 25% water change every day. Well, looks like ich is all gone, but one of my platys is acting very weird - sits in a corner and swings side to side. It's really hard to describe, but it looks like a flexible piece of rubber stick being shaken in the middle...

Any ideas what is wrong with her?

 

[musho3210]

what were the water params before you medicated?

 

[mrarkus]

Everything was within norm: 0-ammonia, 0-nitrite, 20-nitrate, 6.8-pH

 

[Trishfish]

That little shimmy is not good news. The only platy I lost started doing that before the end. Make sure you treat the ich for, I believe, 14 days, turn up your temp gradually until it's at least 80, and add 1TBL salt per five gallons. There's a sticky for ich at the top of the forum I think. If platies are your only fish in there you might want to add more salt. I found several recommendations to add more with illness and that's what I followed. Make sure you're supposed to be doing water changes with that med or you may dilute it too much. Good luck.

 

[mrarkus]

Well, the medication says to do a 25% water change before adding it every day, so I've been doing that. It also says that no temperature increase is necessary, and that I should stop as soon as I don't see any ich on any fish.

What sucks too is that now everything is blue in the tank, is there a way to clean that up?

 

[magic_marty]

sounds like it has stained ...i had the same thing happen in a 20g tank and there is no way to remove the stains from the silicone in the corners.It changed the silicone in the tank from clear to a light blue and its still there..



You should read on the life cycle of ich , just because you can't see it on your fish does not mean its cured it could and most time is still in your tank.The temperature increase simply speeds up the life cycle of the ich ,the higher the temp the faster the cycle. Three days at 70deg. and five weeks or more at 50deg.F. And its reported that that ich can't survive at temps at 86 and above.Not that raising your temp that high is recommended..

 

[Lupin]

Use medications as your last resorts. Salt and increased temperature by about 28 degrees Celsius would have done the job without any more problems. 2 weeks is the minimum for time treatment.

As for staining by medications, that can be remedied by simply doing water changes or use activated carbon.

Ich won't survive for long in a tank that has a high temperature. Neither will it last long in a tank without any fish considering it needed the host in order to survive.

As to why it was in your tank or how they managed to enter a tank, the question lies in quarantining your new fish. The ich parasites will not appear until the fish becomes stressed and will remain undetected for a long time. They can however be eliminated completely by either removal of fish from the main tank to prevent the ich from getting benefits through hosts(which is not advisable anyway as the method can be stressful) or you raise the temperature to more than 28 along with addition of salt. Again, the latter has to be done in two weeks minimum.