What is a sign of ich?

I am wondering what is a symptom of ich cause my fish sometimes shiver either they sometimes do it at the bottom against the gravel or at other levels to but they don't do it a lot only sometimes but enough to cause som concern.

 

ich would show up as white dots, like grains of sand on the body and/or fins.

 

I saw pictures of fish with ich and it's like BettaCouple says, like tiny grains of white sand or salt are stuck to their skin. Difficult to spot if your fish have marbled colour patterns like mine, I guess.

Do your fish also seem to rub against objects (or the glass), as if to scratch an itch?

What fish do you have? Livebearers? There's that shaking disease I read about. Let me think. That's it: shimmy. Perhaps you could look into that?

P.S. I actually thought one of my fish had ich and I looked closer. Luckily, it was just tiny water bubbles on its fins. It just had had a bubble shower.

 

I saw pictures of fish with ich and it's like BettaCouple says, like tiny grains of white sand or salt are stuck to their skin. Difficult to spot if your fish have marbled colour patterns like mine, I guess.

Do your fish also seem to rub against objects (or the glass), as if to scratch an itch?

What fish do you have? Livebearers? There's that shaking disease I read about. Let me think. That's it: shimmy. Perhaps you could look into that?

P.S. I actually thought one of my fish had ich and I looked closer. Luckily, it was just tiny water bubbles on its fins. It just had had a bubble shower.

I have two oscars and two jack dempseys . they seem to rub against things and sometimes against one another (oscars).

 

I had exactly the same kind of behaviour: flashing/darting and scratching against surfaces. No gasping for air at the surface, no other physical signs like white dots, red gills, etc. To this day, I don't know what was wrong with them (mollies), but my boyfriend treated with a wide spectrum med and it went just like that. I was against it, but I was away, and I am very glad he did it.

I looked at lots of disease diagnostic information sources, and many diseases had this behaviour as one of the symptoms, but most of my fish had none of the other symptoms. When I went away, he didn't do a single water change, and I wonder if their problem was to do with fluctuating water parameters (pH, temperature, etc.) although I measured it all and it was all within range.

 

It does sound like they could have ich. Raising the temp to 82 or higher for a couple weeks is the way to knock it out.. - this can also help fight the ich without harming the good bacteria.

 

I'd raise the temp too. I had ick once (lost two fish to it! ) But it cleared up pretty quick when I reised the temp to about 85...

 

They have stopped the behavior and the temperature in the tank is at 84 degrees.

 

What's your water parameters like? I've since read that otherwise symptomless flashing is in 99% of cases due to excessive nitrogen waste (n'ite/a'nia/n'aite).

Also, if it is ich, it should be enough to be on the higher temp for 2 weeks, then you should probably gradually bring it back down (there are some reports that keeping fish in the higher range of their temp ages fish).

 

yea 80-82 is probably more comfortable for them.