Q and Ick

[dellrio]

please somebody correct me if i am wrong.. say u have a fish in your tank with ick... and after a while the fish wins the battle and there is no more ick on the fish... isnt the parasite still in the water anyhow? and no matter if u put new fish in a Q tank the fact that there are already parasites in your tank means the new fish can still get sick once in the tank?.. i mean.. does ick ever really go away... and do u need to Q new fish if u have already had ick once.. -- i do realize that fish can bring in other parasites and thats why it is good t Q a fish.... but for the sake of ick.. id sure like to know...

[cabenn]

Edit darn double post. If anyone can delete it feel free or just ignore this one :P

[cabenn]

You are correct Linds, the parasites feed off the fish for any sort of range from 3 - 7 days. They then go dormant and lie in the sand bed or other places they fall onto. Then after a few weeks they will become active again and swim in the water. In theory if they do not find a host in 24 hours they die. Hence why you need to take out all of your fish for about 6 weeks. Their life cycle is 4 weeks but usually people go the extra 2 weeks to be sure. There was some great articles on this here.

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-08/sp/index.htm

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-10/sp/feature/index.htm

It should also be noted that they won't necessarily all die off at once. So that will account for the added time to the life cycle and is one of the reasons why people wait the extra couple of weeks.

[dellrio]

ha! i think i would kill a lot of coral trying to get all my darn fish out.....

thia may be silly.. but is it possible they cna host on other things? like nittibranchs or clams, or maybe shrimp.... or such inverts? would u need to take them out too...

[lllosingit]

They need a host fish in order to survive.
Although they won't host on a nudibranch/clam/shrimp it is possible for it to hitch a ride with with them if you bought something from another tank and placed it in yours.

[cabenn]

so I guess in theory you should QT everything prior to putting it into the tank cause in theory the cysts could be dormant on any piece of coral or other invert.