Ich Aftermath

I recently finished, or certainly hope I've finished, an outbreak of ich. I ended up losing two of the six fish we had in the tank (the two that we named, of course) however the bloodfins are doing just fine. We decided that we would like to have a hospital tank afterwards, and picked up a nice 33G tank to function has the main tank. The current 10G will be our hospital tank, once we get the 33G up and running.

I used a chemical treatment (Maricide) on the tank, which had a 5 day treatment. This is definately in conflict with the 2-4 week treatments that I've read about on here. I went a chemical route rather than salt and heat, so that may be the explanation, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't asking for trouble. I have seen absolutely no signs of ich on the bloodfins (we saw the first signs of ich last Tuesday) so I assume that we either managed to get rid of it or misdiagnosed the problem.

My main concern is risking contaminating the new tank with ich. I again assume that if the bloodfins are doing fine by the time the new tank is ready to go, then the ich is gone. While I would have loved to use some of my gravel to jump start my cycling, I'm afraid of contamination so I'm just going to do a fishless cycle without a head start.

Should I still be treating my 10G for ich? I can easily add some more salt and heat to the tank.

Should I really be concerned about infecting my new tank? It's going to take awhile for everything to cycle, so I would guess not, but I'm extra paranoid this time.

If I'm going to want to give the 10G a bleach bath, does it really make sense to use material from that tank to seed another tank? I imagine that if there's anything particularly nasty (yet not nasty enough to kill the bloodfins) in the tank, I'll end up bringing it over with the fish, so moving some plants or rocks really isn't going to be that big of a deal. However if moving fish/bacteria from the old tank into the new isn't a problem, why would I need to clean the 10G with bleach? The advice seems contradictory to me, but that may simply be due to a lack of knowledge.

Thaks for all the help so far, on this thread and the other.

I've been watching the bloodfins since I got home today and I'm not 100% certain that they are as okay as I thought they were. Their fins, but not their whole bodies from what I can see, are twitching/stroking rapidly when they stay in one position. They have fairly rapid gill movement as well, and I've caught them swimming by the filter return a few times. None of this is particularly new, the fin twitching has been going on since I bought the fish. What I'm not sure of is if this is normal behavior or if it's flashing. After reading a few posts about twitchy fins it seems like it may very well be flashing.

I'm going to subject the bloodfins to another around of ich treatment, just a heat and salt bath this time. I was foolish and followed the on-the-bottle directions for my Maracide, despite having read that I should treat the fish for at least a week. I'm going to give the bloodfins a salt bath (1 or 2 teaspoons per gallon) at an elevated temperature (82F.) Should I start counting the seven days from today, since I don't see any spots, or should I start counting the seven days from the first day that the fish stop flashing? If they continue to flash after seven days, should I simply stop treatment on the assumption that the salt isn't helping? How long should I continue before chalking it up to other factors?

As of Monday my ammonia was at 0ppm, and as of yesterday my nitrites were at 0ppm. I intend on testing tommorow to make sure the parameters haven't jumped for some reason.

If I'm over reacting to normal bloodfin behavior, please let me know so I don't subject my fish to any more unneccessary stress. I already feel crappy over the two fish that died, I don't want more dead ones.