Ick?

my goldfish has little white dots on it's back tail fin.... what could this be? i'm thinking ick... but i'm just not sure! it doesnt look like fungus... but maybe it hasn't grown? it's had the little dots for about 3 days now and it's been spreading... the little dots dont get bigger... but there's just more of em!! help please!

 

Sounds like ich to me.

Does it look like this?


As long as you don't have any scaleless fish like plecos, you can treat it by raising the temperature to about 84* (a bit warm for goldfish, but if you have an air stone he should be fine) and add 1tbsp of aquarium salt / 5 gallons.

-Chelle

 

me too

 

that cure never worked for me, my fish became distressed, so now i use quick cure, since i have scaless fish i just do 1/2 the recomended amount.

 

i put aquarium salt into the tank and i used some of the rid-ick stuff from kordon. it tells me to put 1 tsp for every 10 gallons i have every 24 hours... isn't that a bit much or am i reading it wrong? i did a 25% water change right before i put the salt and the medication in as well... =( the little white specs are beginning to multiply in numbers and have moved to parts of my golfish's body!!! and yes! it does kind of look like that picture that u showed me except there is more of it!

i dont know what caused my fishes to get "ick"... any tips as to how i can prevent it in the future?

 

If I remember correctly ich is an organism that is always present in the water it. It infects fish when they become stressed causing their immune system not to function as well as it should. A common cause is drastic temperature swings.

 

How many times have you added salt?

Your only supposed to do the full dosage once. After that, you only add more after you do a water change and only enough to cover the water change. So if you have a 50 gallon tank and do a 25% water change that would be 12.5 gallons. You'd only need to adde2 1/2 tbsp of salt. So if you've been adding the full dosage of salt every 24 hours, you most likely have too much salt in there.

Ich is an oportunistic parasite. When your fish get stressed, their immune system is compromised so ich has a chance to attack. If I'm not mistaken, the white spots are sort of like blisters where the parasit has attached itself to the fish. The common belief is that ich is constantly in the water so your fish is always a little at risk. However, after I've initially cured ich, I have NEVER had it return unless I've added new fish. So that leads me to believe that it's not constanly in the water, but introduced by new, infected fish. But that's just based on my own experience.

-Chelle

 

i dnt like that water temp. raise and salt, my fish stress out to much with the water being so warm, even if its like 84