Possible ICH OUTBREAK!!!

[tigerpistol]

All of my fish were doing good. Then about 2 days ago they ALL had white, grainy specks on their fins/bodies. This is only in my 2 show tanks. So far it has killed my blonde naso tang and 2 pacific blue tangs. I know that tangs are very susceptible to ich, but they were all doing very good. They didn't seem stressed out. This all happened in a matter of hours. I had recently purchased 2 gumdrop gobys, 1 lrg maroon clown, a coral beauty. I raised the tank temp slowly to 83 degrees to help speed up the life cycle of the ich(if that's what it is) and also started treatment with Quick Cure(yesterday). Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

[lostanime]

Watch your tanks closely. One or two life cycles of ich don't typically kill otherwise healthy fish. Tangs are particularly susceptible but almost every tang I've purchased has had minor signs of ich (even after dipping, in quarantine)

I've heard anecdotal success from use of vitamin C and garlic additives to fish food.

Although ich is an external parasite, many (if not most) fish build an immunity to it fairly quickly. As long as you can minimize other sources of stress, it will clear up. Think of it like a cold. Happens alot, and it COULD kill things, but by itself it's not normally life threatening. If a fish is stressed on the other hand, it will fall to the first thing that comes down the pike.

How's your water conditions? Salinity? PH? Temperature? Ammonia? Nitrite? Nitrate? (specific #s) Are the temperatures, ph, or salinity fluctuating at all?

How many fish are you stocking and how large are your display tanks?

Are you running UV or ozonizers?

We actually had very visible signs of ich show up on a fish we added over a month ago (blue throat trigger)... we did not dose anything (since treatments will nuke filtration, can cause skimmers to misbehave, and even do severe damage to various types of corals and invertibrates) and ended up just tossing him in the main tank so he could have a less stressful environment to get over it. He's clear and shows no signs at this point, and none of the other fish (including 3 tangs) showed any signs through the ordeal.

[tigerpistol]

My show tanks are a 55g acrylic and a 36g bow front. Water parameters - undetectable ammonia, nitrite, nitrate. Phosphates are nearly undetectable. PH 8.3. Salinity 1.026. Temperature 83F. Not running UV or ozonizer. It just happened out of the blue. Also, it has only killed 1 of my pacific blues. Thought he had passed, but when I moved them out of the tank 1 of them started swimming like there was no tomorrow.

[lostanime]

Sorry about the delayed response (been "offline" for the past couple days)

Those parameters sound great. If your continuing to dose for ich, did you remove carbon and cut off your skimmer? If you haven't yet, make a point to so you dont neutralize or remove any of the medication from the tank. If you continue dosing - also make sure you do so for the full lifecycle (ich can only be killed by chemicals during one of their life cycle phases, which can take up to 3 weeks even with elevated temperatures)

The tanks are a bit small for specimens like pacific blue tangs and nasos since they both can reach feet in length, but if they were smaller (<5 inches) this probably wasn't a major cause of stress.

Are there any other fish in these tanks beyond the ones you mentioned? With any fish over 3" please note their sizes.

Was every single fish feeding "normal" until they started passing?

Specific fish (such as mandarins, angels, etc) and most invertibrates are highly sensitive to copper based treatments. Copper is a common ingredient for ich medication - if yours contains this make sure you move sensitive fish out of the main tank into quarantine to avoid further losses. Use PH and temp adjusted freshwater dips to knock off/kill as much ich as you can, and dont have ANY substrate in quarantine tank... when ich fall off to multiply and eventually hatch, they attach to liverock/substrate so a clean quarantine will let you "wipe down" the inside daily to remove all ich before any start hatching and reinfecting the sensitive fish.