Do you quarantine new arrivals? (1 Viewer)

[Guest]

So far, we've been religious about quarantining additions to our tank. It's a bit of a pain, but we've had a couple of fish that died in quarantine and I sure was glad that we hadn't added them to the display tank. What do the rest of you do to try to keep from introducing disease to your tank? Dips? Quarantine fish only? Inverts? Corals? Macro??

 

[rxonco]

I don't ever quarantine anything...fish or inverts. I've never had a problem.

 

[incysor]

None of the above.

I try to only buy from the LFS's that appear to have clean tanks and healthy corals/animals. Then I watch the critters pretty closely at the LFS to make sure that the individual animal is doing well, cause all stores are gonna lose some no matter how well they know their stuff, or how careful they are with the animals. I will QT an animal that appears to be getting sick once it's in my tank, but so far I've only had a couple outbreaks of ich, and kick-ich and Sherri's garlic remedy worked fine.

B

 

[Guest]

Nothing like rolling the dice!!

I like to QT the fish, but everything else goes with the dice.

 

[Guest]

I went through a wipeout of most of my fish last year, and based on the advice I got on RC I setup a hospital tank for the remaining fish and let the main tank go fallow for 6 weeks, to rid it of any parasites. After that, I would QT every fish for 4 weeks before adding them to the main tank. Then I got my tang, and after 3 weeks it was looking great, showing no signs of disease, and I felt sorry for it being cramped in a 20g tank, so I moved it to the main tank. Two days later, it started flashing and showing signs of ick. :-x

I used garlic a couple of times per Sherri's suggestion, and bought a good UV sterilizer, and I haven't had any problems since. I've added 3 fish to the tank since then, and all have been fine and shown no signs of ick. Bottom line, I know the only way to 100% get rid of ick is to QT all arrivals (including corals, which not many people do), but even then it's so easy to bring it back into your system. I have chosen to live with the fact that there is ick in my tank and manage it by keeping the water quality high and using UV.

 

[incysor]

IMO ALL marine tanks have ick, period. If the fish are happy/healthy their immune sytems just fight it off, and you never see the signs of it. If they start getting stressed, or they're injured they have trouble fighting it off effectively, and then you see it.

The only exception to this that I can think of would be if you were to catch all your own fish/inverts, and harvest your own LR and coral, and QT them all one by one before putting them in your show tank. Since I haven't heard of anyone that can manage that I don't believe there is an ick-free tank out there.

The things I've read/heard about UV sterilizers basically comes down to if you run one high enough to kill ALL the ick, you've also just killed all your bacteria and phyto, which means your reef isn't gonna last long.

Of course this is just my opinion, but I think that QTing every fish/invert is silly because ick will still hitch on your rock/corals. I think that if you don't put obviously sick animals in your tank, maintain your water quality, and don't put animals that are not compatible in your tank, be it because of tank size, or other animals etc... you're unlikely to need to maintain a QT tank.

This of course mainly addresses ick, and not all the myriad of other parasites, or diseases our animals can come down with. If a fish appears sick, and I can remove and set up QT tank I will.

B

 

[Guest]

I never QT anything.

 

[BiggusDiccus]

I have a Blue Hippo Tang that gets Ick whenever my PH is low. She's my barometer for the health of my tank.

 

[imsuperjp]

QT a new fish is like putting a new toy in a glass case and sayin you cant touch it for a month.