Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
It doesn't, apart from the fact that it makes your fish healthier and their slime coat kicks off the parasites and prevents re-attachment. There may not be 'traces' of the infection, but the ich is still there.
Do an experiment - treat your display tank with ich-attack for the proscribed period. Then go the the LFS and buy a new fish. Put him in quarantine for however long you'd like and treat however you'd like to get him 'clean'.
I can virtually guarantee you that the moment you put him in your display, he'll show ich. The ich in your display tank was never dead; it was simply dormant or otherwise kept under control by the immune system of the fish in the tank.
Anything, absolutely anything, that can truly kill a parasite that amounts to nothing more than a microscopic crustacean, is going to obliterate more than just said parasite.
If there was a truly reef-safe method to kill ich, it wouldn't be a 'recommendation' by anyone; it would be an order. There wouldn't be 'suggested' forms of treatment like QT or hypo-salinity; you'd just use that stuff. It would completely revolutionize the fishkeeping industry.
It simply doesn't exist. There is nothing on the market, and IMO never will be, that can kill ich in a reef tank without annihilating your invertebrate population and destroying your live-rock. There's no way to target-kill ich without also irreparably damaging your biological system, mobile and sessile invertebrates.
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To be fair, you're talking about marine tanks and I'm not. There's a considerable amount of science around the use of Napthoquinones to kill freshwater protozoans.