Odds are that the little whitish creatures you saw were not one of a couple of species of Ich since the white spot on the Ich-afflicted fish is a cyst (trophozoite). That is the visible stage but it contains a rapidly dividing crowd of organisms, which will split into a couple hundred to a thousand trophonts. When those free swimming trophonts are let loose into the tank, those can (hopefully) be treated or killed by a UV unit or maybe mostly sucked out of the tank by a diatom filter, Those swimmers are probably invisible to most of us.

What you saw could be dangerous to the fish. They also could have been Cyclops, dangerous to small fry (usually smaller than guppy new-borne), food to larger fish. It is also possible that they are other crustaceans which usually are food animals to guppies but sometimes predatory and sometimes (if they came from water in which fish live) carriers of parasites and diseases. I would have treated the plants too.

You may not have had a chance to click on the Immediate Help link in the upper right hand corner of most Guppylog pages. Please do that, then scroll down to Plants and specifically find “Cleansing New Plants.” That Immediate Help page might be useful to you in other ways too.

That involves alum. By losing a fish, I discovered that the plants shouldn’t be left in the alum for hours since they evidently don’t shed it all that quickly if they have had a chance to actually absorb some of it. However a treatment of 20 or 40 minutes and rinsing/ soaking them (maybe in a full wide-mouthed, soap-less gallon pickle jar) a few times should clean them off.

You probably could soak the moss (willow moss or Fontinalis antipyretica?)  ) and its rock, if you have a clean and soap-less container big enough for both and the solution. Do rinse/soak the rock well. Hopefully it is a hard rock and will absorb little alum. (Soft rocks like limestone dissolves a lot into the water and shouldn’t be used.)

Alum is also used by some municipal water treatment facilities. That got me very twitchy but chemist Charles Harrison (also a GL member) informed me that the alum is put into cloudy water and particles are drawn to the alum molecules and they precipitate out of the water. That process is called flocculation.

It is better letting “them” do that at the water purification facility, not in our aquariums. ;) There is a product commercially available which is supposed to clear water in our aquaria. I’d guess that while alum isn’t involved there, that some sort of flocculating process is supposed to take place.

I have also quarantined some plants, which do not need rooting, to see if they will have any hair algae on them. Najas, Java fern, Java moss, water sprite and the like still need adequate light during that time.

To my delight, a trio of American flag fish cleaned up all of the hair algae in a tank this summer. They left the Java ferns and Java moss alone. I was amazed and delighted. HOWEVER I took every other fish out of there first because the American flags (Jordanella floridae) would chew up guppies pretty badly. J. floridae will also eat the odd duck weed missed up a clean up, but they can’t keep up with lots of duckweed.

There are a few other fishes, which will eat hair algae (black ruby barbs) or a limited amount of duckweed (the killie Fundulus notatus or the rainbow cichlid, Herotilapia multispinosa). However with the possible exception of some suckermouth catfishes (family Loricariidae) I wouldn’t trust any of those fish with guppies. :(

Thank you for posting your thoughts. Since there have been server and software problems here, participation and even visiting has dramatically dropped. I, among other regulars here, am also active at other sites and e-mailing lists, but we wish this site’s owner the best. We’d like to see him fix all of the technical difficulties. (Dear Santa, please give Scott Lockwood 48-hour days.)

If you wish to post to Guppylog again, please just make a new diary entry. People will see it sooner.