[ChuckG]

Originally Posted by ChuckG

I'm not sure if anyone has thought of this one yet (simply because I've never read it) but it seems to me that if you have a fish in QT for ich and it gets to the point of looking good that it simply means the parasites have left the fish. That means they are on the bottom of the tank going into their own next phase. Wouldn't this be a good time to remove the fish and thoroughly clean the QT and then replace the fish in QT? I would think that you would get rid of hundreds if not thousands of the parasites before they reemerge (sp) into the water column looking for another host.

OR - this might also be a good time to simply remove the fish and put him back into the display and overfeed to build up their immune system.

OK - call me crazy (It won't be the first time).

That was about a week ago when I said that. On another forum discussing ich another person has similar ideas (and took it into much more detail).

Below is a copy of the post:

OK, this whole discussion got me thinking in a different direction for a method of treating Ich that I haven't seen discussed before.

First a basic recap of the parasite's lifecycle starting with the trophont stage of Ich when feeding on the host fish.
Stage #1 - trophont
The trophot feeds for somewhere between 3 and 7 days on the fish and creates the cyst around itself (or whitespot) that we see.
When it's done feeding the cyst bursts and the trophot is free and leaves the fish.
Stage #2 - protomont
At this stage it's known as a protomont and it crawls around the substrate for a few hours looking for a suitable place to encyst and multiply.
Once it finds and attaches itself to a surface it is known as a tomont.
Stage #3 - tomont/tomites
The tomont then starts to divide into thousands of baby parasites known as tomites.
This takes anywhere from 3 to 30 days on average before the cyst hatches.
Stage #4 - theront
Once the cyst hatches it releases the tomites which then become free-swimming theronts that look for a host fish to begin the cycle anew.

Ok, all other methods of treatment are based around breaking the lifecycle at the free-swimming theront stage when the parasite is most susceptible to medications or hypo.
So follow along and let's say you setup 2 hospital tanks.

The infected fish go into tank #1 for 2-3 days. Long enough for any mature trophots to fall off the fish, but not long enough for them to fully complete the next 2 stages of encysting, dividing and hatching.

The fish are then moved to tank #2 for 2-3 days. Again, long enough for mature trophots to fall off, but not long enough for the hatching of theronts.
During this time you would empty and sterilize tank #1 to be used for the next move.

The fish are then moved back to the cleaned and sterilized tank #1 for the next 2-3 days during which time tank #2 is emptied and sterilized.

By the time you are finished moving the fish for the fourth time they should be completely free from any trophonts since they have not stayed in one tank long enough to get reinfected and the trophonts are only known to stay on the fish for 3-7 days at the most.

The upside of this is that it avoids using any dangerous medications that need constant monitoring like copper, it avoids the need to keep the fish in monitored hyposalinity at exactly 1.009sg (which some experts still question the effectiveness of,...just go ask Bob Fenner.), and it completely rids the fish (in theory) of Ich in less than two weeks.

The downside of this method would be the additional stress of the multiple moves between tanks.
Of course if you stop to consider where your fish came from originally, this really isn't any more stress than they went thru to get to your tank in the first place.
Think about it.
#1 The fish was collected from the ocean.
#2 The fish was placed in a holding tank.
#3 The fish was bagged up and transported halfway around the world.
#4 The fish was placed in a tank at the wholesaler.
#5 The fish was bagged and moved to a LFS.
#6 The fish was placed in a tank at the LFS.
#7 The fish was bagged and brought home.
#8 The fish was placed in your QT tank after being subjected to whatever dips or treatments each of you does.
#9 The fish is moved to your display tank.

That's a heck of a lot of moving stress that our livestock survived long before ending up in our final display tanks, and I would dare to say it's a lot more stress than the simple moves between hospital tanks that I'm proposing.

Alright, now that you've heard me out, go ahead and chime in.
This is just off the top of my head and I'm certainly no expert or have any formal education on fish biology, diseases or treatments.
So please feel free to blast all the holes that you can in this idea, or to point out any obvious fallacies and pittraps that I have overlooked.

Right now this is just an offbeat idea that came out of the blue, but I'm severely tempted to setup 4 small hospital tanks in the future and give this a try with some damselfish or maybe even a couple of small tangs just to test it out and see what results.

I'm just wondering what anyone else thinks about this. To me - it almost seems like common sense and certainly should have been something that someone has already tried and tested before now.