After 22 days, I can safely say the Ich danger is past.
Status:
Low
Casualties:
All ghost shrimp.I treated the tank for 5 additional days after the last cyst disappeared. I did no water changes and dosed either 5 or 7 drops a day--if 7, I added the last two at night. This is what likely wiped out the ich.
Lesssons learned:
The water change method did not seem to work for me. Treating at half dose once a day without water changes seemed to do the trick, as well as spare my plants. Also, use a Q-tank to monitor signs of ich before entering new fish into your tank.
I may have mentioned it before, but all ghost shrimp perished in all my tanks. The one shrimp that seemed to be doing swimmingly suddenly took poorly one day, and two days later it was dead. This goes for the same with the one I introduced to my sole betta vase with the mayaca. I have a few explanations for this.
1. The shrimp may not be getting enough oxygen in a plant-only filtered environment.
2. They may be lacking iodine to molt. This is controversial, and like the explanation above, it stems only from circumstantial evidence.
3. The surface area of the vases may not be enough to sustain the oxygen requirement of shrimps.
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I am ecstatic to finally conclude this ich disaster. It blows to begin my blog on this note, but I plan to form an article out of my experience. Since I'm talking about doom and gloom, let's talk about another failure of mine, an attempt to keep some baby zebra finches alive. Ordinarally, I would not chalk this up to a failure if I had not been the one who ultimately caused their deaths. We had two pairs of finches in our bird cage, a couple of societies and zebras. The zebras were hounding the societies so unmercifully, I became so fed up that I let the zebras go outside. (For all you tree-huggers or conservationists, yes, I made sure to release the male and female within a mile of each other. Only reason I did this was because the ONLY store who would have accepted them was closed and the zebras needed to go that day to keep the societies alive. It was an executive decision. If that makes you hot, go fuck yourself or jump in the lake, whichever option turns you on more.)
I tried feeding the babies with bloodworms mixed into a paste of hot water. This sustained them for over 48 hours. One started to wane in the period of three hours, and that baby died in the night, ensuring the doom of the second one, which died by ten a.m. the next morning.
Here's a picture of them:
And that ends on a good note of doom and gloom.
My next post, I will finally move on to a topic more cheery.
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