Ich

[akopley]

If one of my fish has ich...and i want to sell a piece of live rock, will the ich be on the LR also? Or will the LR be safe to sell also?

[Mariner]

I'd say that there's a decent chance that some Ich "eggs" could be on the LR. If you or the person you sell it to will just keep the LR in a tank by itself (no fish) for about 6 weeks, it will be OK.
HTH,
Mariner

[XtrmCHoPZ]

yes theres a good chance the rock will have a # of life stages of ich on or in it. The best way to avoid ich from the rock is to QT it for a couple months, dry it out or throw it out! All of those options suck! If u dont know by know....ich is the bane of the marine hobby and causes more people to leave the hobby than anything else! i hate it with a passion and wish some company could finally create a product that is gauranteed to rid tanks of it! But i doubt that will happen anytime soon!

[bkbailes07]

no matter what, any tank will have ich in it. it is always on the rock and in the aquarium. i would not worry about it.

[bertoni]

I don't believe that ich is always present, and I don't really see any evidence to demonstrate that.

[Shagsbeard]

Ick is "always present" in tanks that the owner isn't concerned about Ick. It comes with everything that you get from the LFS, or even from the wild. It is very easy to break the life cycle of Ick and have a tank that's free of it. Proper quarentine proceedure will keep a tank Ick free. If you want an ick free tank, it's extra work, but it's not so bad that you shouldn't do it. Any tank over 75 gal should be Ick free. It's just too much work to treat the fish in a 100 gal when they get ick. They will if you don't take preventative measures.

So it's not "no mater what..."... it's "Without care, any tank will have ick in it."

[Mariner]

To understand ICH better, please read this article (http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-08/sp/index.php) and this article (http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-10/sp/feature/index.php)
While the topic is discussed and debated quite a bit, from the reading I've done I believe that it has been well established that the Ich parasite has a predictable life cycle and that it cannot live indefinitely without a host. Experiments have shown that something like 99%+ of ICH cannot live six weeks without a host. IME, when I removed fish from my main tank, treated them and let the main tank remain fishless (fallow) for 6 weeks, and then returned the fish, I have not had another ICH outbreak or seen even one white dot on a fish in over three years.
HTH,
Mariner