Once I felt very confident that the tank was suffering an outbreak of Ich that wasn’t going to take care of itself (come on, we’ve all read the anecdotal reports of these sorts of things going away on their own and we all want to believe it could happen), I began to research possible reef safe remedies. I haven’t dealt with Ich in more than 5 years and I figured it was worth a deep dive to see if anyone had come out with a possibly effective reef safe treatment.
My searching yielded all of the usual suspects: garlic, vitamin C, higher water temps, lower salinity — basically, nothing new from the last time I dealt with an Ich outbreak. There were also the handful of alleged ‘reef safe’ treatments. I already regularly use Kent Marine Garlic Xtreme, so I upped that to 5 drops per day (from 0 to 2 drops per day) soaked into frozen food. I also added Kent Marine’s vitamin C supplement and ordered up Polyp Labs Medic as it appeared to have the highest online ratings for dealing with Ich in a reef tank.
I pulled the carbon out of my sump and started dosing Medic at the base recommended dosage in accordance with the instructions (two doses per day – after 10pm and before 10am). The fish were a mess, so after the first full day of dosing at the minimum amount, I confirmed no negative effects on my coral or other inverts and quickly ramped up the dosage to the full 3x the base amount. In 200 gallons of system water, this meant I was going through the tiny bottle of Medic at an alarming rate. I quickly ordered another bottle as I calculated there was no way I was going to get anywhere near 20 days out of one bottle.
Of course, I can’t say that Medic doesn’t work. However, I can say that the 16 days I dosed it into my tank yielded no visible reduction in the parasite load on my fish. My coral and other inverts didn’t seem to mind at all, but if Medic was doing anything against the parasites, it wasn’t doing enough. Over that period, no fish died and everyone kept eating, but from what I could tell the overall number of parasites were increasing and the most heavily affected fish were becoming lethargic. Having been in the hobby for such a long time, I have developed a ‘Spidey’ sense for when things are about to pass the tipping point, and now, I sensed that loss of life was just around the corner.
16 days into the Medic treatment, I made the decision to discontinue it and go with the nuclear option of Cupramine. I performed a 20 percent water change and briefly placed carbon back into the system to pull out as much Medic as possible while I made plans to separate the fish from the inverts.
Age of Aquarist 