Yet another ick problem. advice please!!!

[McFred]

I just got a blue lipped tang on sunday and it is getting a case of ick(i assume. little white spots on the "torso"). i have fed it brine shrimp and my tank has plenty of algae for grazing plus nori on a lettuce clip. i did a 50% waterchange a week ago and all of my parameters are fine and i am skimming too. i also added a sailfin tang (at the same time) and he is doing great eating and swimming and lookin fine but the other is shy and doesn't appear to be eating much though he has eaten some tonight when i fed. what is this i hear about garlic?
i have moved a tank before and the purple tang got what this fish has got and it cleared up without an outbreak since(a year) when should i worry about the poor fish's life? i have seen some bad cases but this is not bad yet. any and all help is appreciated in advance.

 

[phishy4]

Just do a search on tangs and ich. There are probably 100 posts. You will learn all you need to know about using garlic and the treatment of ich. One thing I know is once they get it bad they do die rather quickly.

 

[24Tom]

I tried garlic and then kick ick and then a FW dip when the ick got really bad. The dip was very stressful the sailfin died that night. The kick ick seems to have killed my green favites moon. If I had to to it again I would immiedately set up a QC tank and start with the garlic. I'd cycle the QC tank. As soon the ich started getting bad I would put it in the tank with a non reef safe treatment like copper. The same fish had a few minor bouts with ich that went away without any changes.

 

[Goldmoon]

Here is a website with many articles on diseases. Diagnose. Ich and parasites, Ozone and uv sterilizer etc.
http://saltaquarium.about.com/cs/fishdiseases/index.htm

First thing you should do even if you are not sure it is ich would be to start soaking their food in garlic. Often this will be enough.
Ich is caused by some kind of stress.. could be the water quality, fight among fishes etc. Once this is solved, often ich will go by itself. Yours is probably stressed by his new environment... My humle opinion is that if you remove your fish to put it in a quarantine tank, it will just stress him more

As for my experience, about a month ago (or so) we got caught with ick. We were going on vacation and could not do much. For a week we soaked their food in Kyolic garlic juice (found at GNC), the day before we left we installed a uv sterilizer. (I know many people are against that in a reef system but I have read also some people that have many years of experience in the hobby say that they would not go without it.. so the debate is and will always be open). Anyways.. we put a UV and left the next day hoping for the best. One of our fish was so full of it, he had some even on his eyes. Well we came back a week later and no sign of ick anymore. One was still scratching, so we gave garlic still for a few weeks. Now everything is gone, now they only get one garlic soaked meal a week for prevention. I am not saying this is the best way to treat ich, just that it worked well for us ...

 

[fishfarmer]

Add a little liquid vitamins to your garlic extract when you soak your nori. They will need as much help as they can to fight this.

 

[camel shrimp]

There is also a new product you may want to try made by Kent called Garlic X-treme. I have been using with selcon to dip food for about two weeks and it seems to be working well. Just want to give you some more info to work with. I bought this stuff MO from pet warehouse.