Best way to get rid of ick on clowns???

[DustinB]

Personally, I prefer elevating the temp and using hypersalinity for siluroids. The last time I had to treat clowns for ich I put the temp at 90F and used three level teaspoons of table salt per actual volume, treated for three weeks. The salt should be added over a long time span so as not to cause osmoregularity problems for your fish. I think I took 24 hrs to get all the salt added. If changing water during treatment, make sure your new water has the salt already dissolved in it before adding it to the tank.

Mark

Table salt??? Raising salinity? I've never heard or seen or read of anyone doing this.

There have been a few studies on marine ich. Temp has no effect on the life cycle of marine ich, there is no need to stress your fish like this. Fish can also tolerate low salinity better than high salinity. Anything over 1.030 and you're going to have some floating/sinking fish.

[wesleydnunder]

Personally, I prefer elevating the temp and using hypersalinity for siluroids. The last time I had to treat clowns for ich I put the temp at 90F and used three level teaspoons of table salt per actual volume, treated for three weeks. The salt should be added over a long time span so as not to cause osmoregularity problems for your fish. I think I took 24 hrs to get all the salt added. If changing water during treatment, make sure your new water has the salt already dissolved in it before adding it to the tank.

Mark

[DustinB]

The first thing to do would be to move them to a quarantine tank. You will need to leave your main tank completely empty of fish for 6-8 weeks to ensure the lifecycle has completed and the ich infecting the tank has found no host and died.

In the quarantine tank you can either do the hyposalinity method for 6 weeks or treat with cupramine for 6 weeks. Clowns are pretty hearty fish and would tolerate cupramine pretty well. If you treat with hyposalinity you need to be dead on 1.010 measure with a refractometer and keep it that way for 6 weeks without fluctuations. Cupramine is a very popular treatment, make sure you have no rock or substrate in the quarantine tank and get a decent copper test to maintain the levels. If you do hyposalinity search google, there's some good guides on that method.

One note on cupramine. You will need to do daily to weekly water changes based on the number of fish and size of tank to keep the ammonia levels down. The ammonia badges are supposed to work well as an indicator when to change water. An easy way to keep the levels at .5 is to mix your water change water and add the cupramine to that and measure til it reaches .5. That way any water you are adding has the same copper concentration as the water you are taking out.

[dthang8]

What's the best way to get rid of ick on clowns? I've been reading and it says constant water changes and keep salinity level down.