The Puffer Forum

I have a 50g tank with a baby porc & a couple of clowns in who has developed whitespot all water parameters are spot on there are a couple of blood shrimps and a lot of live rock my problem is what can i use to treat him as i have not got access to a seperate tank and i know any medication will either kill the shrimps or the live rock im quite new to marines and at a total loss at what to do.

For Now take out the shrimp put them in a pot or something, and Slowly lower the Salinity of your tank to about 1.016 or so with the Fish in the tank while increasing the temperature of your tank to about 28oC. This technique of lowering the Salinity of your tank effectively suffocates the WhiteSpot bugs aka ICH. As Marine ICH cannot survive in Low Salt conditions for they wont be able to breathe properly and slowly suffocate then die!!! This Technique is called Osmotic Shock Therapy and is the best way to Rid your tank of ICH ie WhiteSpot. Raising your tank temperatue will speed up the Process (Life Cycle of Ich) more.
Even if just your Clown Fish have ICH, Your WHOLE Tank is INFECTED so soon Porcy will get whitespot too thus keep all your fish in the tank while you treat it.

To Help explain this method of killing WhiteSpot more Clearly, Read this short article:
http://saltaquarium.about.com/od/hyposa ... linity.htm

Good Luck

P.S. Now again remove each fish from your tank and put them in a bowl of Fresh conditioned Tap Water ( 0 Salt) for 5 mins. These Freshwater Baths will help Suffocate the WhiteSpot Bugs aswell!

This is a hospital forum question. Can you answer all of these questions, please?

Since this board has been up, we have found there are several questions that routinely get asked in order to help diagnose problems. If you can have that information to begin with in your post, we'll be able to help right away (if we can!) without having to wait for you to post the info we need.

1) Your water parameters - pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrates and salinity (if appropriate). This is by far the most important information you can provide! Do not answer this with "Fine" "Perfect" "ok", that tells us nothing. We need hard numbers.

2) Tank size and a list of ALL inhabitants. Include algae eaters, plecos, everything. We need to know what you have and how big the tank is.

3) Feeding, water change schedule and a list of all products you are using or have added to the tank (examples: Cycle, Amquel, salt, etc)

4) What changes you've made in the tank in the last week or so. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference.

5) How long the aquarium has been set up, and how did you cycle it? If you don't know what cycling is read this: Fishless Cycling Article and familiarize yourself with all the information. Yes. All of it.

We want to help, and providing this information will go a LONG way to getting a diagnosis and hopeful cure that much faster.

Here's an article from this forum that you should read.

library/hospital/swich/

Walrus Head wrote:For Now take out the shrimp put them in a pot or something, and Slowly lower the Salinity of your tank to about 1.016 or so with the Fish in the tank while increasing the temperature of your tank to about 28oC. This technique of lowering the Salinity of your tank effectively suffocates the WhiteSpot bugs aka ICH. As Marine ICH cannot survive in Low Salt conditions for they wont be able to breathe properly and slowly suffocate then die!!! This Technique is called Osmotic Shock Therapy

Okay, not quite. Decreasing the salinity is definitely the right thing to do. Osmotic shock therapy is great. However, there are two things – first, osmotic shock therapy doesn’t inhibit breathing. It actually forces the parasite to explode. Second, you have to remove the live rock and any filtration device and keep them in a separate container of water with ammonia or rotting fish food, to keep the nitrifying bacteria from starving, or else treat all the fish in a hospital tank. The salinity change will kill the nitrifying bacteria and cause your tank to crash.

just read this bit:

Although this type of treatment is primarily intended and safe for Fish-Only (FO) tanks (those with no live rock or sensitive invertebrates present),

does that mean lowering the salinity will kill the live rock?

Your live rock will not survive in 1.016 so you have to take that out. Try searching here for Hypo.

i think the "Osmotic Shock Therapy" would be the easiest way forward is there any articles that explain this in greater detail as i want to be double sure before i try this as i dont want to mess up and harm the fish in any way

I posted a link for you that describes the process.

SW "whitespot" is not Ich, it is a totally different parasite called, Cyrptocaryn. Please famaliarize yourself with the proper treatment of this parasite in the article about this in our Library. You DO NOT raise the temp for treatment of this parasite. It will lower the O2 of the SW system & cause respiratory distress of the fish. You also do not do a hypo treatment in the main tank with live rock & sand in there or it will cause huge amounts of die off which will wipe out everything in the tank with the ammonia spike.

We still usually call it ich, though, right?

Not me.

sorry for the delay i just done a search in the library for "Cyrptocaryn" and it didn't find anything i cut'n'pasted the word in are you sure thats the correct spelling thanks.

I always thought whitespot & ich were the same thing too? Not that I've ever had it/either (touchwood).

It's listed as saltwater ich. But I already linked you in my first post.

Sorry seems someone has confirmed me to be a Fish Medic Noob. So I am Staying out of this from now on !

No problem. I'm still learning, too. See, I didn't know not to treat SW ich (okay, crypt) with heat. Keep reading in the forum, and you'll pick up a lot.