goldengill

After a 3 week quarantine and a close inspection, I put my new swordtail in the main tank (40gallon) and boom, the next day she had full blown ich. Bummer! So I start the treatment with Rid Ich (we've had good luk with it in the past). All my water parameters were good. I took out the filter, did my 25% water changes daily, put 2 teaspoons a day in, according to the directions, and it looks like after about 4 days, it was starting to really clear up. One night I was too tired to do the water change but I did put the medicine in. The next day, full blown ich again!

So, it's been about 7 days, and I haven't missed a water change, and it looks like it's going away, but now my older swordtail is spitting out her food, looking stressed and lethargic and the new swordtail was picking on her a lot. It was so bad I had to move the older one out into the quarantine tank which I really didn't want to do because I have 3 neons in there that were all good, but waiting for the ich to clear up in the big tank.

I checked the water (using Aquarium Pharmaceuticals freshwater master test kit) and I'm shocked to see an ammonia reading of .5, while the ph is 7.2 and the nitrite is 0. We have a 6" pleco, a 2" ghost cat fish, the 1-1/2" and 2-1/2" swordtails and 6 1-1/2 " assorted tetras. I've read that you should have at least a gallon of water for every inch of fish so it seems that I'm safe with the load. I just read more on ich and I am slowly raising the water temp but I have to check to see what everyone's top temp of comfort is. Current temp is 80F. We immediately did another 2/3 water change to get the ammonia out.

Did a 25% water change for 7 days cause it to start a new cycle? Or did we do something that killed the good bacteria and it’s cycling again? This is a very well established tank and we try to be very careful when we introduce new fish. Why is my swordtail spitting out her food? Is it stress? Ammonia? All of the above? And why was the other one picking on her so much? I’ve never seen that before with swordtails.

Sorry about the long post, I’m just anxious and confused.
Thanks for your help.

Goldengill

Gargoyle

I had to fight for about a month to get my sword on the mend... I thought it was ich but turned out to be some sort of fungus issue. Anyway I hope you get that part figured out.

As far as the sword spitting out food I have a couple that do that from time to time. I think it may be normal for some of them to do that. I also think you are doing way to many water changes.. I mean your taking out all the meds before they can do anything it seems.

So there are my couple pennies.. I hope it helps some..

Butterfly

As for spitting out the food, some times that particular piece of food is too big and they spit it out, break it up and then eat it.
I have never used that type of ICH meds before so I can't say if it's helping or not, but I do know... if you raise your water temp up to 82-84F, do daily or every other day 25% water changes and continue this for 14 days the ICH will go away.
Did I understand you to say you took the filter out ? If so the filter needs to go back into the tank. The fish need the filtration and aereation. This could also be the reason for the ammonia spike.
The one inch of fish per gallon of water doesn't always work the way it's suppose to. The mass of a fish determines how much waste it produces and that has to be considered also. Your 6" pleco produces much more waster that 6-1 inch neons do. does that make sense? Also the inch per gallon is to figure adult sizes so for adult sizes. Hope that helps
Carol