Is there a sickness that resembles ICH??

I am begining to wonder if my powder brown tang has ICH at all... is there another sickness or disease of fish that could resemble ICH?? The reason i'm qusetioning it is because last night before going to bed i observed my fish....Tang looked great. Lights went out. Next morning, lights on and the tang looks bad...spotts all over him and he's rubbing and scratching, swimming kinda like he's drunk or acting really goofy swimming head on to a powerhead stuff like that. when i came home from school at lunch time..(4hrs later) he's got nothing on him...not scratching. Throughout it all he's always eaten like a pig, when i haven't added any food he's constantly grazing my LR. Could he have something else and i'm diagnosing wrong?

 

Still sounds like Ich to me. The amount of spots on the fish will vary, as the parasite falls off there will be less. Then new ones will attach and you will see more. It goes in a cycle.

 

i understand that but what i wasn't sure of was the time frame...like i said it was fine before bed, morning it had ich , 4hrs later not a spot....anywhere. that was the part that was making me second guess it

 

My clown did that fr a week! Woke up one morning, Bang! Ich! I vowed to get some ich attack when I got home from school, lo and behold, no more ich. Now it started again!:

 

yeah it was just the time frame of 4hrs thats making me wonder. to go from having signs of ich, to nothing, back to ich in a matter of 4 hrs seems strange but maybe its ich, i just don't want to treat the wrong illness. Still wanting to know if there is an illness that could be mistaken for ich

 

Sounds like a simple case Cryptocaryon or white spot or common ick disease , Its caused by a family of protozoans know as Protoctista all of which are single celled organisms such as amoebas, dinoflagellates .

They pop up when there is a stressed fish in the tank and the slime coat is down . If its eating and doing fine then just let it be I just turn up the heater to a steady 79 to 81 and keep it there but the key is stability with the temperatures . Many tanks swing from 77 to 80 + depending on time of the day and lighting cycle .. So I figure my high temps and adjust the heater to hold that 24/7

All tanks have these parasites in them and they rear up from time to time like a common cold they just happen . But with the fish eating and doing O.K it will pass they will often times attach to the gill lining and thats what will cause the fish to hand out in a faster current flow of water to move more oxygen across their gill plates .

Its the knee jerk and panic reactions of most who read the ich crap and confuse themselves with white specks that do the most harm by stressing the fish more to chase it around the tank to yank it out and f/water dip or toss it into a quarantine tank All that does is just adds to the problem .

And with tangs I find people have to low of )2 dissolved into their systems now day people get all freaked out if the see a damn bubble in the water and try to keep them out I have plenty of micro bubbles but you have to really look hard to see them and I run several air stones in my sump with a huge air pump at 4 psi I boil my sump water . Not to mention a skimmer that pulls about 4500 GPH through it .. But my tangs live for yrs and yrs ..

All this have being said I would simple warm the tsnk up and lower the lighs and lower the stress and watch out for over feeding as that will just lower water quality and add to the stress issue and let it be I think it will slough it off in a few days as the parasites cycle out and fall to the bottom and lay in wait for another cycle of lif to beging with a new addition of tempature jump.

 

Thanks alot, i know everyone means well in giving advice but i feel the same as you, i'm just gonna let him be and contine to observe. I haven't lost a fish yet and i want to keep it that way. one last thing i must ask...is there a way to measure the level of oxygen in a tank? i know some people have oxygen bottles they run with their system. Is this something i should be considering? I have microbubbles too...i try to control the amount but with a HOB skimmer its almost impossible to avoid.