[greenbean36191]

10.) My cleaner fish/shrimp cured or helped my fish get rid of ich.

There is no evidence that any cleaner species eats ich in any real number, either in the wild or captivity. It's never been found in the gut of cleaners in the wild and in lab tests cleaners have never been shown to make a significant difference on parasite loads. The ich parasite is under the skin of the host and without harming the host fish, the cleaner only has access to the parasite for about the 5 minutes that it takes for the parasite to burrow through. Because that 5 minutes occurs in the wee hours of the morning, cleaners will never naturally encounter the parasite during that time. In the lab, even when cleaners were induced to clean during the period when the parasite was burrowing in, they ate very few of them and made no significant difference in the parasite loads of the fish. The white spots associated with ich are only damaged skin due to the parasite underneath and guess what a large part of the diet of most cleaners is.... dead skin and fish mucus. Picking off the spots doesn't cure the fish.

11.) A UV sterilizer will kill everything good or bad in your tank and significantly reduce disease, food, or filtering capacity.

Even when UV sterilizers have near 100% kill rates of the organisms passing through, in recirculating systems they don't make a huge impact on the overall populations. They are limited by the fact that the breeding population in the system is always much larger than the number of individuals being killed. They can also only kill those organisms that are in the water column. There are numerous experiments confirming that the use of UV sterilizers on recirculating systems either has no significant impact on parasite populations or on infection rates.