Ich continued...

So, I still have ich in my tank. The new pleco's been getting worse and worse in fact today I noticed that his eyes are now cloudy and the right one looks like it's peeling -ew!

The cichlids are still active. The acei may have fewer spots on them, but all-in-all they are looking fairly good. The original pleco, for the past couple days, has looked like it's been breathing fast. I'm a bit concerned (paranoid?) about that because everything I'm doing to combat the ich is reducing the oxygen levels in the tank as well, so hopefully I don't kill them with the treatment...

But Wednesday I ran out of Aquari-Sol after adding a 1/2 dose in the morning, so after work I went to pick up another bottle and some salt to add as well. Unfortunately, they didn't have Aquari-Sol... So, I spent about 20min looking at all my different options. It seems Machalite Green is the medication of choice, but I'm pretty sure I've used that before and it turned all my decorations green. It wasn't a big deal back then, but now I have a big, expensive piece of WHITE limestone holey rock in my tank that's too heavy to take out and I'd really rather not have it turn green... So, I was left with copper-based meds (similar to Aquari-Sol) or Formalin (formaldehyde). I decided to stick with copper meds and ended up choosing Mardel CopperSafe based on dosage since I have a large tank and the Aquari-Sol's dosing of 12 drops per gallon meant I had to count out 12 x 72 drops a day >:-P.

I didn't notice until I got home that the instructions on the CopperSafe say 1tsp for every 4 gallons treats a tank for a month. Call me skeptical, but... a month!?! That actually creates a problem for me -when I do a water change, how do I know how much to add back in? ...So, tonight I went back to the store and bought an Instant Ocean copper test kit and I also got their hydrometer as well to test the salt level. The copper tested out at about 0.20 and the salinity came out to be about 5 or a specific gravity of 1.002. So now I know.

I'll do a water change this weekend with a good gravel vac. Last weekend I did an over 50% water change, I'll probably do the same again this weekend. Other options are dips (I'd rather not) or maybe setting up my 10gal as a quarantine tank for at least the big guy and treating it bare-bottomed with the stainy green stuff to see if I can get rid of it before he dies (or kill him in the process, which almost seems merciful at this point).

All I know is that instead of my tank being relaxing, fun, or pretty to look at, I can't even look at it anymore. I go out of my way to capture spiders in the house and take them outside instead of killing them and here I am causing pain and suffering to these fish with my ineptitude. And to make matters worse the information online is contradictory and generally unhelpful. ...blah.