Removing Ick in Fish Tanks

Video Transcript

"OK, now far and away the most common malady that you?re going to encounter as far as fish disease, is a little disease called Ich, I c h . And something to know about Ich is that the organisms that cause Ich do exist in normal quantities in the fish tank even when things are OK. And what happens is some sort of stress will happen, overfeeding, you?re introducing new fish, extreme temperature changes. You didn't do the water change right. Any kind of thing that will cause fish stress will cause an Ich to break out. And what Ich looks like, is basically salt granules. It looks like your little salt granules on the fish, on the fins, and bodies of the fish. You can most easily see it on the fins of the fish because it's easy to see because the fins are sort of transparent. You can see those little white grains of sand, that's Ich, you've got Ich. And when you have Ich you should deal with it. And the best thing, go to your dealer at your pet shop, he'll help you. Ask for the fish guy, not the hamster guy, go for the fish guy who knows what he's talking about. Couple things you can do before you get there, you can turn the temperature of your tank up a couple degrees. This will kill off a lot of the Ich just by merely turning the temperature up. The other thing you want to do is get the product that your dealer will recommend, we like Coppersafe. Follow the instructions on the bottle. It's a good idea to take the carbon out of your filter. The reason being is you don't want to filter out the chemical that you?re going to be adding, so we're going to turn our filter off and take that carbon out and set it aside for while the treatment is working. Probably a couple days. After a couple days, I'd put it back in cause most of your chemical is going to be effective those first couple days. Again, follow the instructions, add accordingly, and you don't have to worry about deleterious effects. You might want to take out your snails and your Plecostomus because these could be negatively affected by the Ich, so you probably should consider taking out the snails. This is going to be treating a fish with scales on it and it's pretty powerful stuff."