TWesty

My husband has gotten back into owning a saltwater tank and there is something wrong with two of the three fish in the QT. I will explain it best I can. It looked at first like white spots on the outside of the heads of my coral beauty and one of my pajama cardinals. Now on the pajama I see (since it is somewhat translucent) that it is a wormlike thing that goes down into its head and it is not just one it has several. Same with the coral beauty. We have treated it with copper safe (when we thought it was ich) with no luck. My husband has been doing research and told me to give the three a freshwater bath. OK here is where I get confused. The white things appeared to have gone away in the freshwater, HOWEVER!! After I put them back in the saltwater within half hour or so they were back. It looks like a white worm emerging. Could this be a worm of some sort? If not, what could it be? I myself do not know much about saltwater tanks, but my husband had a saltwater tank for years and can't figure out what this is. We have done all the water tests and they are all where they shoud be (so I'm told). He had suggested they were anchor worms. I looked them up and only found literature about them being in goldfish and koi and other freshwater fish. So the treatments only applied to freshwater fish.

ffffrf

i have an ick outburst to this way it is expensive but you cound buy a nother small tank and then treat the other tanks water with some medications

Tommy Gun

Hey TWesty - Welcome to the forum!

First, good job of being ready with a QT tank...this is going to worth every penny in the long run!

Secondly, yes, it is possible that your fish have an intestinal worm problem (not 100% sure if anchor worms is one of them in SW or not)and this could very well have opened the door for an ich problem as well so you may not want to stop treating for Ich if you can find Ich-like symptoms.

However, even though I am NOT a saltwater fish disease expert (not even close really), I believe that you would want to treat any intestinal/internal illnesses/parasites/etc by having your fish ingest the meds versus adding meds to the water alone. This can be pretty easy to do by using a med that will soak into your fishes' food in order to get them to eat it. You may also want to try adding a garlic supplement as well (same type of soaking product). Not only have I found that garlic often helps entice fish to eat (possibly even when they would otherwise refuse) and I believe garlic is not a favorite of internal parasites and can prevent infections to some degree. Getting back to the ich treatment though...

....I am 100% sure that a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but I have recently come to the opinion that freshwater dips and even medicated dips may not be hugely effective against Ich - basically because they have protected themselves very well by digging into the fish, and I am also pretty sure that a fish's uncontrollable reaction to having Ich attach to it also helps benefit and protect the parasite further. In fact, I am 99% sure that, like freshwater ich, marine ich is not effected by medications when it is in the stage of life that looks like little white dots to us and is why many hobbyists will state that the only truly effective treatments of marine ich are hypo-salinity (causes osmotic problems that the protozoa cannot handle as well as a fish....ironically, if you are treating for FW ich, you would add salt, but for marine ich you would lower the amount of salt in the water) and copper.