Ich... help!

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Chill

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Jul 27, 2019
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I have a tank with 3 large fantail goldfish, a Raphael catfish, a Pictus catfish and a tiny clown pleco. The one goldfish and pleco were added to the tank last Sunday from an aquarium store and now all our goldfish have white spots all over them. To acclimate then we let them float in their bags waited a little while added some tank water to the bag waited added a little more water to the bag waited and then let them into the tank. But I believe Our new fish brought ich):

All of our ammonia, nitrates/nitrites, ph and everything seem to be fine and we do weekly 25% water changes and vacuum the gravel. Then we remove decorations as needed and rinse them under the sink with no chemicals.

We do have a small 5 gallon tank we could use as a quarantine tank it’s not ideal since it’s not cycled and it’s not a lot of room for 6 fish but hopefully if we need to quarantine them for a short amount of time it would be okay.(?)

It took us months to figure out how to cycle the tank and the past few months our fish have finally been living and doing good but we have no idea how to treat ich and I don’t want my fish to die): any advice on how to treat the fish and get the ick out of our tank would be greatly appreciated!!!
 
Could you tell us about the set up of the tank (size/parameters etc...there’s a list of questions in this thread that would help us out: https://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f17/before-posting-about-unhealthy-fish-read-this-32451.html)

You absolutely do not want to move all those fish to a five gallon uncycled tank. Once ich is in a tank the parasite needs to be treated in both the fish and the tank so quarantine isn’t much use in this case even if it was a large enough tank for quarantine.
 
Yes, dimensions and parameters of the water would be helpful.

Right now maintaining high water quality is going to be key. With the sort of fish you have, you're going to have to be careful with treatments. Cat fish and plecos are sensitive because they're scaless fish. Turning the heat up on the tank will speed up the life cycle of the ich but that comes with needing to increase your water change regime.
 
Unfortunately the tank is at my boyfriends house so I can’t get exact water measurements now. The tank is 50 gal and the water stays around 72. I can get the other measurements when I go over tonight. Is there anything I can pick up at the petstore before going over.
How warm should we make the water? I saw something about moving the temp to 80 degrees online but isn’t that too warm for goldfish?
 
I’ve also read about removing a fish from the tank into a smaller bucket and soaking them in salt for a few minutes. Is that safe or okay to do?
 
Yes, the problem you have is that the warmth treatment can stress the goldfish and other typical treatments can stress the plecos and catfish you have. You can do a dip probably on the goldfish but I wouldn't do it to the others.

I would SLOWLY raise the temperature a degree or so at a time to 85 F. If you give the fish a chance to adjust I think they'll be alright for the short term. Be mindful of it though and if the goldfish look to be reacting badly start going back down. Water changes are going to be key. At 85 the parasite won't get on new hosts so get them out of the water column. Daily water changes would be best. Also throwing an airstone in the water wouldn't be a bad idea. In theory the heat and water changes should be enough to get rid of the ich in about 10 days.
 
Thank you! Due to having the two different types of fish we were wondering if we should separate them and put them in a smaller tank and treat them separately so we don’t put either the catfish or goldfish in more harm. But I see others don’t recommend that. I do think I could leave the goldfish in the big tank and put the 2 catfish and pleco in our 5 gallon one. The two catfish don’t ever come out of the decorations we have so I don’t think they’d be too upset in a smaller tank for a few days but I don’t know. We also do already have 2 air stones in the big tank and our smaller one has a couple too so we could move those up to the big tank if we don’t separate them.

We might try the salt dip on just the goldfish tonight. We added the new fish Sunday and just noticed the ick last night. unfortunately most of our gold fish are mostly white so I think we missed the first sign of it and they probably already had it for a couple days before we noticed and last night one of the fish was not very active at the bottom of the tank so maybe the salt would help them a little bit as we work on raising the water temp and preforming the water changes.
 
The big hitch with separating them into the five gallon is it's not a cycled tank. You'd have to be vigilant to maintain water quality while treating for ich at the same time. It might be a little much. You could also try a medication for ich that doesn't have malachite green in it. That is what scaless fish tend to react badly to. I don't personally like using medications if I can help it but with the goldfish it might help speed up the process so they aren't in very warm water for too long. I'd still try the heat treatment first and keep that as a backup plan. If you do use a medication take any charcoal you have out because that'll just remove the meds.
 
Well I was thinking we have to do a water change on the big tank so we could use some of that water in the smaller tank to cycle it and then just do a slight water change on it before adding the catfish.

But for now I’ll do like you said and we’ll keep everyone in the same tank and get the meds Incase we need it and try just warming up the tank and doing water changes.
 
Using old water really doesn't do much to cycle a tank. Old substrate, filter media, decorations might. But not the water. The bacteria you're trying to grow when cycling isn't in the water so much. Just what it eats up i.e. the ammonia is.
 
Ohhh okay we definitely won’t do that then. We used to keep a small filter in with the big one in case anything happened we could cycle it quick but our tank had been doing so good for months when we changed the big filter last we took it out. Oh well.

Raising the tank to 85 is about a 13 degree change for our tank I know well need to monitor how the fish are doing to see if we can get it that warm but about how long should we spread the temp change out? Would it be over hours? a day? more?
Also thank you so much I really appreciate your help
 
Considering your goldfish I would go cautiously with the temp change. Maybe a degree every two hours or so. Some people go even slower to a few degree a day but I don't think you need to go quite that slow.
 
I tested the water
Ph:7
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate:20
Ammonia: .5
Temp: 72.1 (and about to start increasing the temp)
We’re doing a water change now so ammonia should go down and will do another partial water change tomorrow too.
 
I would be very very careful about raising the temperature too much. People do it because it speeds up the life cycle of ich but honestly I wonder if the stress of that temperature on a cold water fish might do more harm than good???

If anyone has done it with goldfish I’m happy to be corrected but it’s probably not the route I would go.

I’d probably just do 50%+ daily water changes and maybe something like paraguard (starting at half dose which is what seachem recommends for scaleless fish.) The ammonia in the water is a clue that poor water conditions helped this take hold and pristine water will be needed to get the fish’s immune system up again whether or not you use medication.

How big are all these fish? You may already be passed the bio filtration capacity of your tank if it is not a new tank and you’re seeing chronic ammonia readings.
 
The one goldfish is pretty big the other two are smaller. This is the first time we’ve had ammonia in our reading. We don’t do readings every time we change the tank but so far we hadn’t seen any. We do a partial water change every week and today was the day before we normally do it. We also had some algae and did an extra scrub on some stuff last weekend and removed some of the substrate so I’m wondering if that threw off the cycle a little bit? We will keep an eye on it.
We raised the temp to 74 degrees tonight and we did end up doing a salt dip just for the gold fish and a 30% water change. They definitely seemed to be more active after the salt dip. Maybe we won’t raise the temp too much but maybe a little more if they seem to tolerate it to maybe speed the process up some but not too much to stress the fish.
 
We also removed some of the substrate. We had a really really thick layer of rocks we had some plants but the fish would eat it and pull the plants up and the plants would die so we removed the plants a couple months ago so we removed probably half the substrate. I know there’s a lot of good bacteria in the substrate I didn’t think about that when we took some out.
 
Yes that could easily have thrown you into a mini cycle which stressed the fish enough to make them susceptible to ich.

Pending a goldfish expert showing up and telling us it’s fine I definitely think being careful with the heat is a good plan.

Glad the salt dips are helping. That’s a good way to help drop the parasite load on the fish without dosing the whole tank or stressing them with too much heat over days/weeks. From what I’ve read they generally tolerate salt dips well.
 
Well we were hoping just the water changes would be enough for the cat fish but now one of them died so now I’m thinking we might need to get the medicine so none of the rest of our fish die):
 
Really it depends on how infested the catfish was. There might have been no saving it. I know I've read about goldfish tolerating the heat treatment but never actually done it myself. Like libertybelle said, do half strength of the medicine to not harm the remaining fish. I would also recommend just flat out doing 50% water changes rather than 30%. The fresher and better quality the water the better the fish will feel and be able to respond to treatment.
 
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