i'll just address the original poster, ultra.
i had two ocellaris clowns when my tank was cycled+1 month old. one quickly developed white spots, not very serious but here and there. i paid no mind to it because it ate well, swam well, didn't scratch against rocks. others told me that it could be ich and i needed to take care of it before it spread. i figured hey it was acting healthy and people said ocellaris were hardy so i did nothing.
after two weeks, the clown started to swim near the bottom of the tank and a string of waste could be seen being dragged by the fish. at that time i had learnt a great deal about ich so i started looking for a cure. kick-ich was the first thing most people recommended but i opted for the garlic treatment because i had inverts in my tank.
i did this garlic treatment for three weeks with no apparent improvement. i know a lot of people swear by this remedy but as far as i could see, no one really proved that if it wasn't the combination of the dormany period and lack of a host for the ich. while i was using the garlic treatment (and ginger too) the clown got marine velvet. it was just a bad-lucked fish.
so now i had to use kick-ich, but it was already too late. It died after one complete treatment (14 days) and the process killed many snails. apparently kick-ich wasn't as invert-safe as it claimed.
however that wasn't the end of my nightmare. soon after, my fridmani pseudochromis and three of my green chromis got ich and they all died within the next month.
later on i joined a fish club and made friends with a
lfs. the
lfs and members of the fish club had similar experience with occellaris clowns. they all had difficulties keeping occalleris clowns. we were all puzzled by the concensus of them being a hardy fish. we could only come up with this explaination: while both tank raised and wild caught ocellaris clowns might be hardy, the wild caught ones endure more during transportation. and it's likely that they already have parasites in their body, the ocean is so big comparing to a tank so it's not a big threat. but when confined in a home aquarium, there's only so much space, the chance of parasites finding a host is greater.
i am not big on quoting what people say about their own experience and disputing it because it differs from my own experience. my fish keeping experience has been far from normal; i mean, i have a tang that likes to eat meat more than veggies so what the hell, i could come on here and tell you that tangs are carnivore and i wouldn't be wrong.
so what am i saying here? take everything you read with a grain of salt, that includes mine. as i mentioned before, everyone's experience will be different. maybe you'll add some garlic juic, the white spots go away and you'll become a subscriber of the theory. maybe you'll do nothing and it goes away too and you become a believer of nature healing. maybe it's really just sand. i kind of doubt you are that dense but who knows! but hopefully i am wrong and your fish lives.
