friendlyfins

Hmmm. So much conflicting information. I have 4 Aquarium shops for which I go to - for different things amongst them to deliberately get their take on what to do. I raise these sorts of questions and ask for advise of what to do in the case of severe ich & fungal disease. Armed with this information, and all that is available on the net, it boils down then to trial and error. All 4 pet shops advised different medications & methods of treatment (raise temp & salt), whilst adament about not commencing others (which the other pet shops did!). Some love melafix, some laugh at it! I can honestly say sometimes you sometimes need to go by your own experiences and make a decision. I found on this occasion, I threw out the 3 different meds for white spot I was advised to give. I dropped the temp back to normal as well as ceased salt and reduced levels by way of a waterchange. Used a white spot medication which is broad and covers fungal etc, by creating a hosptial tank and dosing it right up - whilst half dosing the problem tank with cats & fry. Results now after 4 days = no more deaths, and my fish playing silly buggers with joy again..... The salt may have stressd the fish as they weren't used to liking salty water. Potentially the melafix mix with malachite green was unhelpful. Therefore the fish were in a water environment they had always been used to, plus a broad spectrum med to cover the disease. All this other playing with the water temps/salt/ etc I believe just stressed them more.....But hey, that's only my experience, and other people experience different successes. :lol:

I have have a similiar issue recently whereby ich progressed to a fairly severe tail rot. I lost fish (Platy's and guppies) of which were the old fish, and the newly introduced fish survived...(they were quarantined first but still obviously carriers...). There is advice out there against as well as for using ich remedy (I used Malachite green) and Melafix together. I used them both together and didn't have an issue with poisoning (one is chemical & one is natural). My LFS told me to net the really sick looking fish and apply pond strength melafix to them with a cotton bud. You never can tell what it was that killed them, especially when you are changing several variables at once (water temp, adding salt, chemicals..etc). I did notice a couple are fully restored to healthy fish again, so I attribute that to the melafix. Scrubbing the tank out is a great idea, but is an added stress for the sick fish for sure, so be careful. It's a case of trying to choose the lesser of two evils sometimes I know. Good luck.