White spot

[thalie_knights]

I think our tank has white spot .. every resource ive found online has said pretty contrasting things - some say its easy to get rid of, other say its very hard as it also lies within the substrate..whats the best way to get rid of this? Our friend has some of the fluid you put in the tank (cant remember name sorry) which ill be using tonight..is there anything else I can do? How does this problem arrive in the first place?

Thanks in advance

[Stew]

Hi there is a few ways to kill whitespot, i use the heat and treat method, turn the tank up gradually to 30 degrees, making sure your fish are able to handle those temps before doing it. This will speed up the life cycle of the ich, then treat your tank with WS3 {thats what i use} you may have to use half doses depending on what fish you have in, Loach and other scaleless fish do not handle high doses to well and may die.

If you have a large tank i would recommend removing the visibly infected fish into a smaller tank and treating it, its much easier to treat inm a smaller tank.

Also if you are using treatments make sure you remove any carbon pads from your filtration as this will render your treatment useless.

Out of curiosity do you have clown loach in your tank?

They can generate whitespot themselves when water conditions are not ideal or if they are stressed, If you get whitespot in your tank and you have clown loach 9 times out of 10 they are the culprits.

[thalie_knights]

Hello - from what i can see about 90% of the fish have the spots, some more than the others. We dont have any clown loaches at all. The tank is about 3foot x 1.5 so I reckon since those that dont have it currently are still at risk, it would be a lot easier just to treat the whole tank?

[Stew]

Yes that would be fine, just make sure that when u raise the temperature you have a lot of agitation to the top of the water to enable more oxygen to get into the water, as oxygen levels decrease in higher temps.

My tank was a 350 litre and it was difficult to treat , so i had to use hospital tank, but your size tank should be fine.
I would recomend getting your water tested as water quality is normally the primary reason for white spot.

[thalie_knights]

we had our water re-tested about 2 weeks ago and it was 0, we had a few probs with a raise in amonia, so bought one of the gravel cleaners, and it went back to normal within a week..