Quarintine Question

Hi,

Quick question. I'll be setting up a marine tank in the next week or two and I've been doing lots of reading. And all the books mention a quarantine tank. I do plan to set one up (any tips/instructions on what I need), but my question is do new marine fish not get quarantined in the LFS, so why the need to quarantine again?


Cheers,

Simon

all you need is a tank, internal filter and a heater...no substrate. i use pvc elbows for caves so they can hide out if they want. make sure your filter sponge is seeded. qt time should be at least 2 weeks...preferably 4. Im sure your books go into more deatil about the above but any specific questions fire away!

no fish dont get qt in lfs....and they dont travel all that well so qt is essential.

Thanks Lampeye, that answered my question nicely!

You can go real OTT on q-tine, but the thing to remember is that if you don't do enough, you are wasting your time.

For me, personally, the main objective is to prevent whitespot entering yoru system. This needs to be part of a double edged sword:
(1) All fish need to be quarantined
(2) Anything else \"wet\" can carry it too.

In my view, the fish are the easy ones to q-tine. The \"other\" wet stuff is not so easy. The erason being, in brief, is this:
Whitepot has several life stages - but essentially it is either free swimming (the infectious stage). It is hosting (actually on the fish). Or it is \"incubating\". The latter is the PITA. You see once a \"spot\" matures on the fish, it effectively drops off where it sinks to the bottom. There is attached itself to the substrate where it \"incubates\" for anything up to 28days. Once it have fnished \"incubating\" it explodes into the water column releasing 1000's of baby \"white spots\" - these flaot around until they fish a FISH host.... if they do not find a host they quickly die.
So the problem is this - any invert with a shell, any rock, or any any coral that is attached to a rock, \"COULD\" be carrying an \"incubating white spot\" - it \"could\" be at its 20th day..... it could be 2-3 weeks since it has seen a fish..... then you place that snail or coral or rock into a tank with fish in it.... a few days later it errupts and all your efforts have been thwarted.

The solution - either q-tine everything for a full 6 weeks - fish, invert, coral, rock or otherwise...... or, put everything non-fishy related into the tank first then add fish later.

What I woudl suggest you do is this:
Set up your display. Put in your rock etc into the tank - if it is cured rock it should be \"mature\" within a week. Over the coming weeks, get all the corals, critters, algaes, inverts etc. ie. everything except the fish. Once you have added everything, then get yoru first fish and q-tine him. Personally, I would put him in the q-tine tank for a week, then start a dose of cupramin (copper) for 10 days, then give him about 5 days to a week and then introduce to the display. That way you are all but gauranteed to eliminate white spot.

If you choose not to q-tine your inverts, rock and corals you stand abotu a 50% chance (pure guess) of intorducing white spot.

If you do not q-tine anything, then you stand a 90% chance they WILL get it.

Even if dealers q-tined their stock for 4-6 weeks, there would still be no gaurantee. As it stands, the best fish you can get at the moment is from places like TMC. All they do is carefully acclimaise fish, lightly dose them with a preventative course, observe for 48hrs, and if they are clean they are moved into the whole sale tanks to be sold on.... realistically that is a week to 10days with TMC which is nowhere near enough to consitute \"quarantine\" - its is merely thorough acclimatisation. That in itself is a HUGE advantage, but it is NOT q-tine, not by a long shot. So the dealers that sell TMC stock are bascailly strating with a better quality animal - not a q-tined one......

I would say, ALWAYS Q-TINE.........
I would further say either FULLY Q-TINE or else Don't waste yoru time with half measures.
Alternatively, run an FO system with NO LR and just treat as and when you need to.

HTH

Matt

Thanks for that Matt.

Something I was reading today mentioned giving the newly bought fish a freshwater dip for 3 to 5 mins as long as temp and ph of freshwater is same as display tank this will kill or make all parasites fall off and everything should be ok, what do you reckon on this??

thats a good idea but i'd dothe dip before qt.
qt gives the fish a chance to relax and fatten up aswell with no competitors for food. fish may not even eat for the first while so qt will help u get them eating and thriving again.
if you are nervous about copper you can slowly bring the salinity down to 1.oo9 known as hyposalinity. ive have had good success with this. there are plenty of other ailments apart from whitespot.....however ws is much more serious in marines than whitespot in freswater tanks.

I agree with matt 100% about adding the fish last.

Cheers Lampeye,

Yeah I think ur both right about fish going in last. I read in on a few sights aswell. Its just so tempting to jump in . But patience is the key. Quarantine tank it is!!

So a 50 ltr tank, filter, heater and light. I was thinking i have a brand new fluval filter that I hadnt planned to use on my new tank. If I connect up to new tank to keep it seeded. then when neccessary I could just fill qt tank with my display water and move fluval to qt tank. Maybe 1 liverock and some pipe. Should be ok??

In my opinion, this is a MUST read for anyone serious abuot disease control:
www.petsforum.com/personal/trevor-jones/fishdiseases.html

Your q-tine tank sounds ok. The filter idea is ok also, and transfer of new water. But once the fish go into the q-tine tank it is essential to mke sure there is no cross contaminantion in either direction.

50 litre - thats maybe 18\"x12\"x12\"? Depending on what you are treating it may be a little small? 24\"x12\"x12\" would be much better. Something to be careful of at this time of eyar is over heating in the tank. If for example you have the q-tine tank in a south facing room on a sunny day and go out to work and all the windows in the house are clsoed tehn you might find the heat in teh room will cause over heating. It shouldn't be a problem, just be mindful & aware of how easy it is to influence the temperature of a small body of water..... and rising temerature plus treatments in a poorly oxygenated tank can quickly lead to low pH, low oxygen, and even asphyxiation.

HTH

Matt

I'm going to put everything non-fishy in my tank first. So what would you recommend. I'm looking for colourful interesting species that will get on with with eachoter?

Any suggestions?