Hey! A little while back our clown-fish came down with Cryptocaritosis.
Here's a link to that thread (The scales of justice?), which by the way has several pics of the infection before and during treatment. I'm linking it just in case anyone has a sick fish and is trying to figure out what may be ailing it. Anyway, our fish is completely recovered, bright eyed and bushy tailed with no visible signs of scars. I thought I might share the treatment regimen, because I know I was worried about what to do when our little guy was sick.
I should preface these remarks by saying that I am not a vet, nor do I play one on TV. It may not be a good idea to subject your fish to this treatment, because I came dern close to killing mine.
1. Freshwater Bath
I started out with a freshwater bath. I put a drop of
prime in a 1 liter beaker and filled it up with water that felt to me to be the same temperature as the water in his tank. We scooped him up and plopped him in. He seemed to be pretty okay with the whole thing for about a minute. The white spots that we were aware of began to burst, and then numerous other spots that we hadn't even seen began to pop too. The bottom of the beaker became littered with tiny white dots. He started getting edgy, and then at the 1:42 mark he acted like he was trying to get out, so we put him back in the tank. It's important not to dump any of the bath water back into the tank because all of the little white crap is actually the parasites, some of them encysted and impervious to extended freshwater exposures. The freshwater bath resulted in almost immediate and marked improvement in his condition. I might add that I wished that I'd had a stand up thermometer and thought about testing the pH of the bath prior to dipping the fish. I purchased on and did incorporate those two steps into subsequent baths.
2. Quarantine
The tank that we have the clown-fish in also has live rock, shrimps, crabs, an anemone, starfish and snails in it, so I rushed out and bought a little 5 gallon treatment tank with a filter that hangs over the side and uses some kind of resin to remove ammonia. I medicated the tank with
Para Guard, which is a Formaline alternative and
Melafix, an anti-bacterial. During his stay in the treatment tank he got a Para Guard bath every other day. This caused some very very tiny white stuff to drop off of him. Now the resin in the filter was supposed to remove the ammonia, but I have to say that I'm not too impressed with it. We had been noticing that he was swimming funny so kept a close watch on him, soon he couldn't seem to stay off the bottom, so we evacuated him back into the old tank. He was really ill when we scooped him up, but soon after returning to the old tank he was okay again. I checked the ammonia in the tank and it was off the chart, so I'm kinda bummed out about the filter.
3. New Fangled Stuff
So, this is a bit out of sequence, but as soon as the fish was removed I treated the tank with the invertebrates and live rock with a product called
Ick Attack. I was sceptical of this product and had just about zero confidence in it, which is why I had removed the clown-fish to a separate tank. I guess that if there are no fish in the tank (the clown-fish is the only one in ours) that the parasite can't complete its life-cycle and dies after somewhere between three days and three weeks. I threw the Ick Attack in anyway even though I segregated the fish, and when he had to be returned to the tank prematurely, I continued with the Ick Attack remedy fully expecting to see a fresh crop of white spots any day.
I have to say that I think it's been more than a month since he went back into that tank, and still no sign of the spots. I am quite pleased and the fish seems to be as well. The stuff worked pretty well I guess. One thing that you should know is that I think it bothered the anemone, which eventually went into hiding. After I stopped the treatment (one week) he came back out, but the starfish got hold of him and ate him up. Also worth noting, as soon as the treatment started a very fine brown powder precipitated out of the water and settled everywhere. I seemed like a diatom bloom, or perhaps a mass killing by the stuff. Anyway, after I stopped dosing the tank the brown stuff went away.
While this was going on I was starved for information regarding the condition, and this post is the result of alot of searching reading and trying. I am hopeful that someone who has a fish in a bad spot may find this useful, and that their fish will turn out okay.
