Vertaid and clams????

[steveyoung]

I have brought some of this vertaid to treat a reef tank that has ich.
The problem is that the company that make it tell me that any clams must be removed.
The problem I have it that my clam has taken hold on large piece of rock that I can't remove from the tank as it is attached to quite a large amount of the reef and the corals etc have grown across the LR.
Has anyone used this stuff on a reef that contains clams and did they survive the treatment?
The active ingredients in vertaid are:

quentin hydrochloride & malagnite green

You will have to excuse spellings if they are wrong as I am having problems reading the bottle

I also have fish, corals, starfish and hermits in the tank.
fish are as follows:

tangs
angels
clowns
dottybacks
hawkfish
copperbanded butterfly
mandarin

Also have any of you actually ever lost any fish to ich as mine are still eating like pigs and seem OK, although a few are covered in ich, there are quite a few that show no signs.
This has been going on for a few weeks now


Steve

[rvitko]

Steve,

The ingredients are quinine hydrochloride and malachite green. A similar product is offered in the US as Greenex. This formula is not particularly effective, frankly given the choice between the damage this product would do to my reef and loosing the fish which could well happen even if you use the product, I would choose to lose the fish. Sorry but this formulation is not very effective and yes, it will kill many things, your corals will live but your pods will be wiped out and damge to intricate parts of the biostructure of the reef will harm your tank. If you do nothing more than bump up the flow and make sure your skimmer runs optimally, feed fish food with garlic added and run your lights 24/7 and dose kalkwasser to keep a high pH you will have at least as much success as this product would provide. I would expect that unless you start a hospital tank and use copper the tang as little chance. The butterfly is copper sensitive and so you would have to use something like metronidazole. The others stand a good chance just from keeping a high pH and feeding well by the methods I outlined above.

[XmanII]

I lost a butterfly fish to ich just after christmas after trying the RxP solution. My polyps and inverts didn't realy like it. I'd suggest getting two cleaner shrimp. They'll set up a cleaning station and hopefuly your fish will pull through. The shrimp will actualy eat the parasites off the fish. I was able to save my clown fish this way.

Also... I don't know how effective it is, but I mixed some garlic with the fishes food for a few weeks as they got better. I can't tell you if it was the shrimp or the garlic but my clown seems to have recovered (knowck on wood)