Quarantine Basics

[wayne]

Lots of people drop out of marine fish keeping very quickly, and one of the chief reasons is they kill a lot of fish very quickly, or they get it going, keep everything alive for a few months and just as they get attached everything dies AGAIN! Typically a few good reasons account for most of these failures.
1. Bad setup - less of a problem than it was in the bad old days.
2.Bad selection - if you like buying clown tangs, moorish idols and dendronepthya you are either very confident or very stupid. These, and many others do not have good success rates for caual aquarists. Be an informed consumer
3. Disease - there are many diseases that you can bring into your home aquarium. Some, indeed most are easy to deal with, and some are not. However one common fact is that you do not want to be caught trying to treat a disease in a tank full of inverts and liverock as most of your more effective cures such as copper, hyposalinity, formalin and antibiotics are at the best going to impact your filter for a few days, and frankly most will lay waste to your inverts in pretty short order. The effects may be obvious (copper being an example) or less obvious, but any cure strong enough to do anytihng to a tough parasitic disease such as ich or velvet is not going to be absolutely harmless to everything else. Don't kid yourself - reef safe cures have no consistent track record of success.

SO what can you do. Easy, quarantine everything, especially fish. Maybe if you have a lot of pricey inverts you treasure you might want to QT everything, or maybe you think a flatworm infestation is a minor problem too. Keeping everything in QT for 6 weeks will reveal almost all problems be it disease or hitchhiking parasitic pestilence. Also 6 weeks in a nice quiet clean space by itself is a good rest/break for a tired fish from the lfs

So what's in a QT tank - is it difficult? Actually no it's easy, and very cheap. Here's how I do it...
1. Tank - I use a tank 75 cms * 35 * 35 cms or for americans 30 * 14 * 14 inches. I use this size because a) I had it lying around, and b) it's about 20 US gallons, so 1/2 full it's 10 gallons.
2. Filter - I have a Fluval 4 internal filter shifting around 150 gallons an hour. I have all the biomedia in - I wants lots of filt in this tank, I don't care about nitrate buildup because I do a good few water changes, but I don't ever want to see traces of ammonia.
3. 150 watt heater - reliable Aqua Stabil, does good job.
4. Perspex sheet on top with a 36 watt PC fixture sitting on it - decent lighting, but not excessive.

In the tank I have a whole load of pieces of plastic pipe of varying diameters, and sometimes a plastic plant or two.

And that's it - it sits on a piece of polystyrene in my basement, and is very simple. Normally the tank has about 15 gals of water in it, but the lengh means mucho swimming room. Also if I need to hypo I can take out 5 gals of water and fill it up with fresh very quickly to make the salinity nice and low. Also I like this tank size as it's big enough to hold fish that are 4 or 5 inches long for the 6 weeks without it looking really cramped.


I like to do two water changes on this tank - I make up a bucket of water, take out some tank water and put the new water in. That's about a 2 1/2 gallon change I tihnk. I do 2 1/2 gallons as that's how big the bucket is. I would do more, but two of these a weeks seems to work pretty well.

And that all works for me. If I'm going to have new fish die on me, they can do it here. And fish unfortunately do die, but doing the above means far, far less fish die than might be the case. You only have to have one full wipeout from ich or velvet to realise this.

Here's an important note - I am very, very keen on dwarf angels and other browsing species like my Kole tang. Whan that did it's time I put in some big pieces of trash live rock for it/them to browse on. I think this is a good idea BUT you have to remember if you decide to medicate this HAS to come out else it can mess with the copper readings.

People get twitchy QT's ing corals. Frankly it's unnecessary - with cheap PC's you can get enough light for most corals to survive a few weeks in QT - they do not require reef standard lighting all the time to survive, especially as with good clean water inthe QT you may well be reducing other stressors. Keeping the water challow will work to your advantage here. My QT setup is barely different to my old fragging setup

[RockingCricket]

Thankyou Wayne. As usual, a great post that will no doubt become a sticky and one that I am very interested in. A couple of questions if I may:

What do you do with the quarantine tank once the fish/invert it is housing is promoted to the main display? Also what do you do to the QT if the fish dies?

Could an Emporer 400 with established biowheels provide adequate filtration for a QT?

Lastly, how on earth do you find the patience to wait a 6 full weeks before you add your hot new addition to your display. Is a full 6 weeks absolutely necassary?

[wayne]

Good Q's - to quote....

What do you do with the quarantine tank once the fish/invert it is housing is promoted to the main display?<<100% water change, bit of a clean up>> Also what do you do to the QT if the fish dies?<<Depends why it died. If it was due to diesease, strip and clean, possibly bleach everything>>

Could an Emporer 400 with established biowheels provide adequate filtration for a QT? <<Oh yeah, for sure. All you're dealing with really is the ammonia. If you do the water changes that's plenty>>

Lastly, how on earth do you find the patience to wait a 6 full weeks before you add your hot new addition to your display. Is a full 6 weeks absolutely necassary <<The first time it seems a long ime, but now I don't think twice. In all honesty I don't actually buy that many fish, and I probably won't buy any now till approx August unless I see something special. I like 6 weeks, 4 is a little short to be 99% safe with ich, but 4 is much, much better than 2, which I think is simply too short for fish. I know people who do 8. After a while you kind of forget it's a QT and it becomes just a pre display spare tank>>

[RockingCricket]

Originally Posted by wayne

What do you do with the quarantine tank once the fish/invert it is housing is promoted to the main display? <<100% water change, bit of a clean up>>

100% water change? So is it necassary to cycle the QT before the new fish is added? Surely not doing so will add more stress to the already stressed fish?

[wayne]

You don't need to recycle. You're just changing the water, and having a clean up. You're still preserving filter media and bacteria on solid surfaces within the tank. Take it from me, there are enough bacteria in a big Fluval internal filter to keep ammonia at bay.
If a disease has been present and treated for, and the tank bleached afterwards you need to precycle the tank. But remember I usually keep some cheapo live rock in there so there's my 'bacteria in a bag'.

[RockingCricket]

Makes sense, and you answered my next question without my asking it.
Thanks Wayne

[Fishchaser]

i have look on every website some say QT tank you must have and some not what would you recommend

[dbacksrat]

A quarantine tank is a very good thing to have--I would recommend you don't start out without one

Wayne's pretty much hit this topic right on the head--nice thread

[Masta_Cheef]

What if you're starting a nano tank? Do the same rules still apply with QT and all?

[RockingCricket]

Any new fish or invert introduced to your system poses the same threat whether it is going into a 5 gallon tank or a 500 gallon tank. In fact smaller tanks are probably even more at risk due to the smaller volume which'll cause a higher concentration of anything introduced.

If you are just starting a tank, it makes sense that you need not quarentine because there is nothing to be threatened in the tank in the first place.