Ick in tank with pictus and mollies?

Question

I'm just asking for some other opinions, I guess.

I have two pictus catfish and three mollies in my quarantine tank. It is about 4x over filtered though use of a sponge filter. It is heated. I have a divider in place to sperate the pictus from the mollies after the pictus ate the tail on my guppy that had been in the tank. (The guppy later died.)

Anyway, I had to leave for several days (Friday until today). On Friday I had noticed two or three ick spots on one of my mollies. I turned the heater up as far as I dared and left my mother with both verbal and written instuctions to check on it and adjust the heater if necissary.

I didn't mention anything else to her, I thought it would be simple enough to do.

When I got home earlier, this is what I found: 
Fish food all over the floor by the tank (the tank sits on the floor.) Fish food in the filter of the tank. Something black and rotting on the other side of the tank.

I looked closer at the mollies. The black one was fine, but one of my Silver mollies was absolutely coated in ick. I checked the thermometer. 82 degrees. It should have been at 86 degrees.

I did a 50% water change,

I then checked on the catfish. One was also covered in ick. It's stomach was very, very bumpy looking.

I turned the heater up even more.

Anyone with experience with pictus catfish? I've had danios at 90 degree water before and like pictus, danios are cooler water fish. Do you think they can handle this heat?

golden lyretail · Answer

Good question on the pictus. Much of the literature doesn't take them up to 86-87 where Ich can not survive. Probably if you walked them up a degree every 12-24 hours they would be ok. If they show stress or darting behavior, back them off.

Interesting the reference to the zebra (?) Danios. From the streams flowing from the Himalayas, they take pretty cool water in the snow melt spring & really hot water in summer. It is curious to find that some (& only some,) semi-tropical & even temperate fishes can gradually take warmer water than some "tropical" species. Other Danios may not be from such extremes.

A couple days after the Ich seems to have disappeared, walk the temperature down only a degree or 2 F per day.

In addition to using heat, copious partial water changes with treated water of the same temperature (a neat trick) may also remove a lot of the free swimming Ich in the mobile stage. Diana Walstad was finding that some Ich strains that are increasingly resistant to medicinal; treatments. She began rotating the treated fish between two tanks, filling one up every day with treated water of the same temperature to dilute the free swimming population.. That was one mighty struggle, but she & her fish prevailed!

Since Ich often blooms where the fish are stressed & the water is less than optimum cleanliness, if we can do as much as 50% nearly every day with water of the same temperature,  that might be a consideration. The cleaner the water, the more effective the fish's immune system is likely to be.  Good aeration in hot water also is very important.

"The Transfer Method for Treating Freshwater Ich" 
by Diana L. Walstad

Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine
April 2005 
Volume LIII
Number 8
#589

I hope your mollies & the pictus lose the Ich & recover with much less hassle that what Diana had to endure!

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Ick in tank with pictus and mollies?

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