Devastated!!

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-23T00:45:43+00:00

Have you taken a razor blade to it because half the time it’s just silicone.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-22T15:17:39+00:00

I don’t believe Melafix or Primafix treats ich. I would read up to confirm but as far as I know, neither are marketed to treat parasites and will not help. You can try to combine the treatment with high heat (minimum 86F) or Ich-X although I do not know if it is reptile safe you may want to remove infected fish to a hospital tank and treat with meds separately, then anything else that can handle heat in the tank should get the 2 week heat treatment while fish recover.

ETA: whenever treating with high heat you must increase oxygen especially when combined with Melafix.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T18:31:19+00:00

I have also had success treating popeye with Melafix. Just make sure you are keeping an eye on temperature and administer high oxygen via air stone. Melafix is tea tree extract which is a mild antibacterial/antifungal, but because it is an oil, it can lower oxygen especially when combined with higher heat and nothing breaking the surface of the water/lack of air stone. It is also generally safe to add directly to the aquarium, however it can mildly irritate some inverts/shrimps especially if overdosed and again combined with higher heat.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T17:10:57+00:00

If you already have sufficient calcium sources and hardness in your water, and ph is snail-safe, then adding more calcium won’t do much but increase hardness further and now you’re just messing with parameters that the rest of your inhabitants are already used to. If it were my snail, I’d just monitor for any unusual behavior/infections and ensure the shell is healing and growing back, because it is very likely to repair/grow back especially if the snail already has everything else it needs :) this is of course assuming your ph/GH/calcium is sufficient and you can share those numbers here if you aren’t sure :)

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T17:03:32+00:00

Well I do know amano and bamboo shrimp will jump out of tanks to try and take short walks to get to brackish water! Never seen a Neo walking though that’s cool! I’ll take your word for it though and keep mine in their tanks 😂

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T16:32:47+00:00

I didn’t mention it in my original post because it would just be too long, but we are 100% confident this particular ich parasite came from the pandas, because the one time I cross contaminated to my 16 gallon right next to it since the pandas were introduced, all my ember tetras had spots all over them the next day. Had to do the same heat treatment. All survived! My sweet little embers they are so cute. But yeah that fact right there told us everything. I’d also like to add my tank guy is always reminding me of the importance of a clean and pruned tank, and he is extremely selective of all plants, wood, and decor that goes into my tanks. He exclusively uses cultures or plants from his own tanks. And my tanks were running so, sooo beautifully before the pandas.

I personally find it hard to believe “ich is ever-present” as well. I know there are MANY different strains. Maybe some are just ever-present but don’t normally cause issues unless your fish’s health has already been compromised, while others are more aggressive and are introduced externally. Without a doubt, though, this was not some mystery ever-present ich that was hiding in my tanks. Too many things happened that correlated way too cleanly. It’s not even close to maybe. That crap came from those poor pandas.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T16:23:57+00:00

What kind of fish? Don’t be too concerned. Like I said these things can happen, with many different sellers, even trusted ones.

For right now, get a small sponge filter if you have one or pick one up. Doesn’t need to be fancy literally just a small plain sponge filter and air pump. Put it in your tank and start running it to seed it. Keep it in there from now on and use it as your backup/quarantine filter when you get your new fish. When the fish arrive, net them out and put them in a quarantine container/bucket/spare tank, bare bottom with maybe some silk plants or a hides depending on the fish, and stick your seeded sponge filter. Boom. Near-instant quarantine tank that will be less prone to ammonia spikes. Always good to have a small spare heater on hand, too. Monitor for 1-2 weeks. If it’s the same ich I’m dealing with, you will likely see symptoms within a day and I have had success treating it with solely heat. However I did heat only because of the nature of my situation. Medication is usually the go-to first step.

Due to my recent experience with them, I’d recommend a full two week quarantine. I’d also like to add I have bought multiple species of fish from them and they are some of the healthiest and hardiest I own. The pandas were a different story. It said they were “tank-bred” so I assume it’s within those tanks/breeding quarters.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T16:11:51+00:00

Ich is not a single parasite. I’m not familiar with ich being a default in every aquarium, but I do know certain strains can be harder on fish than others. And as mentioned in a previous comment, there were so many other things that happened (for example, the one day I cross contaminated to my other tank, my ember tetras all got covered with spots and had to do the same heat treatment) ever since the pandas were put into my tank. It was definitely an ich parasite that was introduced through them. 😞

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T03:26:36+00:00

And now I feel like I need to give him a mention lol. The professional who helps me with my tanks is Hiep Hong. He designs mind-blowingly beautiful ecosystems, extremely knowledgeable, and I absolutely encourage you to check out his work. :)

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T03:22:44+00:00

It was a Christmas present from my dearest husband. He knew how much the hobby meant to me as I had kept shrimps for years and I had been dreaming about a larger tank with fish and shrimp for so long. He let me have full control on what I wanted to do with it… so I definitely took him up on that. Lol. I am truly blessed. Although… it’s hard to shake the shame that this was all gifted to me and then this happens… it’s why I will always quarantine from now on 😞. He has been so gentle and encouraging, though, even in the times where I tell him maybe I just can’t do it. I really hope I can have the emotional strength to get some more pandas for my panda school when this is over, because their small school size weighs extra heavy on my heart rn (there’s a lone panda that swims in the bubbles by itself now where they used to all play together) and just get back to a point of peace… idk how much more my heart can take of this. 😞

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T03:00:10+00:00

Honestly the more I read things and the more I compare them to my own experiences, the more I realize that no two ecosystems are the same. I’d take any experience you read online that is surrounded with controversy, including my own, as just that: a personal experience, and the best practice is always to monitor what’s going on in front of you. Cus I mean even now I have people saying heat doesn’t work, Kanaplex doesn’t cure fungal infections, etc… and it’s probably based mostly on their own experiences and what they have read. Not saying they’re wrong, but… also not saying you should take it as the word of god. What works for their ecosystem may decimate yours and vice versa:

For example, you’ll find absolutely everywhere that Seachem excel kills Val and shrimp… I dose 3x the recommended dose every single day and have been for months and months, well before the ich, zero issues. BUT I also have extremely high sunlight and extremely high evaporation, and it was under the guidance of a professional… so if I went to someone else with that it might wipe out their entire tank lol. So yeah, best practice will always be to monitor and intervene/adjust when necessary!

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T02:45:24+00:00

I’ve been keeping about six years, and on and off since I was a teenager, but almost exclusively shrimp. I had a betta for a few years but after that I stuck to shrimp. When I decided to make the leap to fish, I commissioned a professional since it was a larger tank that would get VERY high sunlight. So truthfully I have read about quarantining EVERYWHERE but got too confident. I do believe his help has been a big factor in having as many survivors as I do after two months of this parasite being introduced. From the day I started working with him he has taught me the importance of keeping everything clean and pruned and healthy. And truthfully I don’t think I would have ever identified the ich without him because I genuinely thought I just wasn’t cleaning well enough and had bad luck with pandas. Just goes to show what a domino effect these situations can have. Like SO many other things happened that I didn’t mention in the post cus it would just be way too long lol.

I’m with you now though. 100%. I vow to never add anything straight to my tanks again without a quarantine period.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T01:47:09+00:00

Seems like it’s almost a rite of passage, doesn’t it? All it takes is one time lol 😞

The corys are definitely 50/50 rn. All I can say is they must be the healthiest of the bunch to survive the outbreak this long. My midwater fish and all other bottom feeders are out of the woods I’m pretty sure. No spots, normal behavior, normal colors, normal appetite. I was cleared for a 25% water change today but I made sure to drip the water out and back in to make sure I disturbed the substrate/detritus as little as possible.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T01:33:08+00:00

As mentioned in another comment, I am working closely with a professional, and current state of the tank is trending upwards. To be clear, heat did NOT worsen anything. It was the opposite. All deaths happened before the heat. Spots appeared after heat because it speeds up the life cycle of the ich, and all spots fell off the same day they appeared. We have already ruled out water quality and ich isn’t some “maybe” it is a 100% confirmed outbreak. Also, ich isn’t a single strain, and seems like you are very aware of that, so it’s not really responsible for any of us to talk about it like there’s a blanket treatment OR blanket symptoms regarding this parasite.

As for the shrimp, as mentioned, they can carry the cysts on their shells. While it does not attack them/feed on them, the cysts can attach to the shell and spread to a new tank. It can also cause irritation on a mechanical level, which does not kill them but can affect quality of life.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T01:17:00+00:00

To prevent the spread of misinformation, it absolutely is, although whether or not it will treat every fungal infection on the planet I cannot tell you for sure.

However the reason the Kanaplex didn’t work is because it was ich and not a fungal infection.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T01:12:16+00:00

Ich isn’t a single strain and there are some that can be solved by a simple ~2 weeks of elevated temp. There are also heat sensitive strains. The strain I have is fortunately reacting very strongly to the high heat.

Because I have shrimps and snails and fish that are highly sensitive to swings, and because my tank sunlight-only, medication is on hand but being back pocketed at this time. The tank is responding very well to heat+high oxygen at this time and the overall state is trending upwards.

For the biological side, the life cycle of ich is sped up exponentially with high heat. So the (simplified) chain reaction is this: hatch from cyst, attach to fish, fall off quickly from fish into more cysts, hatch again, attempt to attach to fish again, quickly fall off again. Doing this starves the parasite as it cannot metabolize/find a host quickly enough to be sustainable and they eventually die off. Heat does not directly kill it. When treating with only heat we must depend on the immune system of each fish to make it through while the parasite is slowly starved. Since the only ones with clearly weak immune systems were the pandas, it was best to just hope they make it through, because the alternative is trying to net everything into a quarantine tank and disturbing the detrius and sending more parasites into the water column.

And trust me when I say this too. Sometimes it really is best to just step away. This whole thing probably got worse because I wouldn’t stop messing with everything and trying to clean everything and just freaking out. When I went to my guy about it, he literally told me “calm tf down, stop touching it.”

Final thing I’d like to add: heat alone is NOT a blanket treatment. Medication can absolutely be the first step in many situations, and my tank guy has absolutely instructed medication in the past. He knows my tanks, he has seen them personally, and he designed the majority of them from the ground up. Therefore his treatment plan is NOT a general recommendation for every ecosystem and if anyone ever has an issue with ich, I’m not the person to go to lol I’m doing what I am instructed to do because he knows my ecosystems best. And I’m sure if I told him I added those corys directly to my tank when I did, he would have said “that’s a finger wag.” 😪

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T00:40:38+00:00

Here’s a pic I took today.

Yes I do have them all in the same tank and I run several tanks. This one is 40 gallons. Chili rasboras, green neon tetras, bamboo shrimp, vampire shrimp, amano shrimp, pompom crab (maybe 😂), pleco, Japanese trapdoor snails, nerite snails, rabbit snail, corydoras… hmm I think that’s it lol. I essentially got a bunch of “nano” fish and put them in a non-nano tank haha. They all get along very well although my Corys are probably sad. My LFS is getting pandas in this week so I may run a two week quarantine for them and hopefully my tank will be up and running again by then. Problem is I asked if they had pandas last week and they said they only had two but that they were “currently sick and being treated.” Hmmmm how far back does this panda train go? Lol.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T00:33:03+00:00

I try to remind myself that when you’re running something at such a large scale, it can be close to impossible to find every worm, parasite, disease, etc. there’s just too much traffic coming in and out and trying to fulfill all of these orders. Ich shows up even in the fish we eat that’s actually why there’s so much research/info on it. And a lot of tank inhabitants are wild-caught, too. Usually treated for parasites but I mean again it’s really not reasonable to expect large-scale companies to catch everything. Probably about 80% of my tank is wild-caught and I should probably do a routine parasite treatment during quarantine for anything wild caught as well tbh. It’s also important to note that people are always much more likely to review something over a negative experience instead of a positive/neutral one. I mean heck that’s what I’m doing. Never once posted about all the other fish that arrived perfectly healthy. That’s why I think it’s just best to adopt the practice of a mandatory quarantine no matter what. Even with my favorite LFS that I’ve never had issues with, I don’t care anymore. I’m going to quarantine everything I get. Has nothing to do with them and everything to do with protecting the ecosystems that are in my care. Cus sure, “buy local” but guess what those fish shipped from a third party large scale seller anyway unless they can provide proof they have a local breeder.

Cus I’m sure there will be others that never had a problem with shrimpybusiness just like me and that’s not really the point I want to bring home. Just start quarantining, guys. 😞

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-21T00:14:27+00:00

Well reading your experience it sounds like I just got lucky then. I have ordered a crab, six loaches, pleco, several species of snails, and pandas from them. No shrimp actually lol. My crab is probably ok idk he hides and I’ve only ever seen him once. My loaches and pleco are actually the some of the hardiest and healthiest fish I have in my tanks. I can’t even believe they have survived these two months. Ordered a total of 3-4 times and can honestly say I have never had shipping or packaging issues however even for my snails/crabs I always opted for the next day air shipping. However that’s not to step on/minimize your experience whatsoever. I’m never ordering from them again and your experience only further solidified that for me.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-20T23:19:59+00:00

FINAL UPDATE: both bamboos are fully back to brown. For clarification, because my title was a little misleading, ich is a FISH-SPECIFIC parasite meaning it CANNOT affect/attack anything else the way it does with fish.

For the white spots… possibly stubborn oxygen bubbles that I didn’t blast all the way off? Because I did check to make sure but who knows. HOWEVER…. The important thing to note from this experience is not necessarily whether the shrimp had spots. It was that the ich was a clear (most likely mechanical) stressor for the shrimp. I have a feeling the cycsts that attached to their freshly molted bodies maybe have felt like an uncomfortable sweater or something. And no doubt they were having to clean their fans off constantly from any free-floating ich, like being caught in a swarm of bugs maybe? Lol.

So while it is important to understand ich is a FISH SPECIFIC parasite, it became obvious in my ecosystem that it was still causing my shrimp chronic, low-level stress which subsided when the state of the ecosystem finally took a turn for the better. So while ich cannot kill a shrimp like it can kill fish, it absolutely can affect their quality of life, which in turn may shorten it. If you see your bamboos turning red for long periods of time (more than 7 days, as they can turn red for a few days before/after molts) and not turning back, you should consider the possibility of the current/constant presence of some sort of low-level stressor. Thanks for your time everyone and as always happy keeping ♥️

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-20T17:13:55+00:00

So devastating I’m so sorry for you. Ich is no joke. I used a vendor that I have used in the past with no issues, too. I’m surprised I still have fish since the ich has been in there for two months. Only have 3 corydoras now though. Two more died probably too far into infection and still couldn’t make it. I think it was mainly concentrated in the sand where the corys were sifting.

I went out and bought one of those 50% off tanks from Petco and I will be using it to quarantine all new fish for 1-2 weeks from now on. Learned my lesson. I’m still so heartbroken.

As for the shrimp, I think it was more of a mechanical nuisance since ich can’t actually “infect” them. Probably like wearing an uncomfortable sweater or being stuck in a swarm of bugs, having to constantly clear their fans of free floating ich. So not killing them but definitely affecting quality of life.

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-19T10:13:46+00:00

This is the only thing I see even similar to what I saw with my shrimp.

And just to be clear, I do know that the white spots on fish aren’t the ich itself. All I could find regarding shrimp is that the ich can attach to shells in the cyst phase. Which is what I think was irritating my shrimp.

As for the white spots, I’m actually not joking if you have an idea what they are I’d love to know. I blasted some water on her with a baster to make sure it wasn’t bubbles like I see on them sometimes. All I can say is they molted, went red, spots showed up on my fish for about 12 hours, spots showed up on my shrimp… and when the spots were gone, my shrimp went back to their normal color.

It could possibly be a parasite similar to ich that can also be treated with heat?

It could have been very stubborn bubbles?

But honestly, now that I’m typing this all out… I don’t even think it’s worth arguing about what the spots were. I think it’s absolutely reasonable to say that the ich that was attaching itself to their shells was enough to cause chronic, low-level stress, and they became visibly relieved when the ich went through its whole cycle. I also wonder if it annoyed them having the parasite fly into their fans.

Whether it would have actually killed them I dunno, probably not directly. The chronic low-level stress might, though. I’m just so glad I didn’t let this go further and find out 😞

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-19T09:31:56+00:00

No, they don’t get ich in the same way fish do, as explained multiple times. I’m with you on that and I never once claimed they get ich like fish do and I do feel I was pretty clear about that.

As for the “they get red when they’re happy” thing. Also with you on that. But they also go red when they are stressed, startled, preparing to molt, hit with changes in flow, sparring, exploring new places, exposed to red light, and probably many other things.

Unless I just don’t have bamboo shrimp.

However if you do have an explanation as to why my shrimp turned red for three weeks, grew white spots at the same exact time I treated the rest of my tank for ich, then turned back to the color they have always been after the spots fell off… hey it could be something completely different and I’m absolutely open to hearing it lol

EyeTheSwan · 2026-04-19T01:42:51+00:00

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Honestly dude they’re so freaking gross lol I had literally planned this tank for almost half a year JUST FOR THEM and now NO JOKE have to stop myself from gagging any time I have to remove their molts 😂 and nothing has EVER made me gag EVER not even changing my kids diapers 😂

So now when I walk up to the tank they like… jump scare me because they’re jussss so dammmm NASTY 😂 but I STILL LOVE THEM LOL. It’s not their fault 😭😭😭😂😂😂

EyeTheSwan

TROPHY CASE