Life Vitamins

When you start noticing those little white spots on your fish, quickly determine if it is a white spot disease known as ich. It is the most common disease of all freshwater and marine aquarium fish. Ich treatment becomes necessary as it may cause serious problems with your fish and other aquarium inhabitants. In fact, ich is also blamed for more fish deaths. Any person who keeps fish for any period of time will sooner or later have fish that would develop ich. The scientific name for the disease is ichthyophthiriasis. This contagious disease of freshwater fish is caused by a protozoal parasite ichthyophthirius multifilis. Ich is so widespread that many experts feel that it is there in the environment of aquariums. In reality, every aquarium fish comes in contact with the protozoan a number of times in its life. Confined fish that suffer from ich get the disease when their immune systems do not function well. And this is due to stress, which lowers the resistance power in the fish. Water temperature and its quality, inappropriate diet, and various other factors all add to stress. It is important to understand about the life cycle of Ichthyophthirius for treating ich effectively. In the adult stage ich protozoan exists on the side of the fish, it begins feeding on the skin and tissue that causes irritation. The cyst stage stays on the bottom of the aquarium, and gives rise to hundreds of tomites per cyst. And this tomite stage is responsive to medication and lasts for only three days. Though, the whole life cycle gets complete in about 16 days and it depends on the temperature. As the life cycle is temperature-dependent and the ich can only be killed in the tomite stage, you should raise the tank temperature to 78-80°F for three days to speed the cycle of tomite development. If the cycle takes about four days to complete at this temperature, the treatment gets over in four days. You cannot destroy ich while it is on the fish, so if you move a fish to a quarantine tank for treatment it would not solve the problem in the main tank. You can use a quarantine tank before introducing a new fish into the tank. If a fish in a tank has ich, the entire tank gets contaminated with ich and thus must be treated. Another way to get ich outside a tank is to take out all of the fish. Since tomites survive for only three days without attaching to a fish, if you take out all the fish and then increase the temperature to 80°, the existing ich in the tank get dead after two days. Other treatment includes use of formalin or malachite green, or a combination of these two. Also, you should take out the carbon from the filter and shut off any UV sterilizers or protein skimmers all through the treatment. It is because they will remove medications that are added into the tank and hence will make ich treatment ineffective.