Question on Ick treatment

[Krypt]

My brother has a porcupine puffer that has ick and he wants to use the chemicals to treat it. My question is, could I take his Anemone, chocolate chip starfish, and orange sea star to my tank without risking infection of my own fish? I have heard the treatment for ick could kill them so we wanted to see if they could move in for a while to my tank.

Also to factor in is my tank is approx. 6 weeks old. My tank is cycled with my amm. 0, nitirites 0, and nitrates at 10ppm. SG is 1.024 and phosphates read 0 all using Sailifert master kit. Our tank setups are almost identical, both 55gal, both with T5HO lights, and live rock.

 

[Krypt]

Oh and he also doesn't have a QT tank to just treat the puffer, he wants to treat the whole DT.

 

[ccCapt]

The anemone and stars don't carry the ich parasite, so they are OK to move to your system.

Just so you know, there is no effective "reef safe" ich medication. To kill the parasite, the fish must be treated by either hyposalinity or copper treatments and neither should be done in the display. You CAN NOT use copper if there is live rock or sand in the tank. It will absorb the copper and then slowly leech it out over time. Basically the rock will be useless. If you treat with hypo in the display, it will kill off all the little critters and any snails or inverts in the tank and cause a cycle, which in turn can kill the fish due to poor water quality.

You can go to Walmart and pick up a 10g tank cheap and set that up as a QT.

 

[Krypt]

The anemone and stars don't carry the ich parasite, so they are OK to move to your system.

Just so you know, there is no effective "reef safe" ich medication. To kill the parasite, the fish must be treated by either hyposalinity or copper treatments and neither should be done in the display. You CAN NOT use copper if there is live rock or sand in the tank. It will absorb the copper and then slowly leech it out over time. Basically the rock will be useless. If you treat with hypo in the display, it will kill off all the little critters and any snails or inverts in the tank and cause a cycle, which in turn can kill the fish due to poor water quality.

You can go to Walmart and pick up a 10g tank cheap and set that up as a QT.

Thanks for the info Capt. I'll look into setting up the QT tank for him. Did not know that it'll leach into the rock and sand, that would be bad.

 

[Bige]

QT may not sound easy but the alternative is not any better or less expensive. If he does the qt then he can go back to dt and feel secure that the tank and mates are healthy. I learned this the hard way much like others have. So heres his chance to learn from others mistakes.

 

[melosu58]

A good link for your QT

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure: A Quarantine Tank for Everything by Steven Pro - Reefkeeping.com