White Spots (Marine Ich)

In respond to Guest's message on White Spots (Marine Ich)

By doing 20% water change every 2 week, the parasites are still in your tank and they will continue their life cycle and infect your fishes. The way to remove the parasite is to cut off their life cycle. There are 2 methods to cure whitespot. First is to use copper-based medicines and do a quick bath dip for your infected fishes. Please note that certain invertebrates such as snails, shrimps and crabs are very sensitive to copper-based medicines and may die from exposure to copper. Fishes however can tolerate for a certain period of time. Another safer way to cure marine ich (white spot) is to do a Hyposalinity treatment. This is how you can perform the treatment.

*Hyposalinity* means the adjustment of the water salinity to a lower level. e.g 1.010

Here are the steps:

1) Set up a quarantine tank with clean saltwater (Freshly prepared without any chlorine). Salinity should be the same as your current tank, e.g Between 1.020 - 1.025
(You may use a clean plastic basin to quarantine the fishes).
2) Place a small power head or air stone into the quarantine tank to provide water circulation and oxygen.
3) The next day, put some freshwater (without any chlorine) into the quarantine tank.
4) Repeat this until the salinity of the water reaches 1.010 (Over a period of 1 week)
5) Maintain the salinity at this level (1.010) for another 4-5 days until the white spots have dissapeared.
6) A submersible heater may be placed into the tank to raise the temperature to about 27C.
7) When fishes are free from parasites, slowly increase the salinity of the quarantine tank by adding higher salinity freshly prepared saltwater day by day until its the same as the main tank (The reverse process).
8) While you are doing this, you may want to change 50% of the main tank water. (The remaining parasites would have died off as they do not have a host to continue their life cycle)
9) Return fishes to main tank after both quarantine tank salinity and main tank matches.
10) Continue to monitor for marine ich.

*The parasites will die off from low salinity and a warmer temperature.
*Use a good refractometer or salinity gauge for this exercise.

Golden Star Aquatics