Quarantine Poll!!

[Regric25]

This poll is Anonymous so NO ONE, even me, will see who voted for what. This poll will close on August 1st 2010. If you want to leave comments and advice please feel free!

So I have often wondered how many people REALLY quarantine their livestock before they introduce them into their tank. I always hear people talking about how it should be done but just how many really do it...

I, like many others, learned the hard way. My tank has been totally void of any fish for a month because I never quarantined my fish before introducing into my main display. I ended up with marine ich and almost all of my fish parished:(. I set up a dedicated quarantine tank where I keep new incoming fish for a period not less than 3 weeks. I have not purchased any more fish yet as I am nervous and I would like to allow more time for my main display to "recover". I was really thinking about what it would take for my display to be truly free of ich and realized that it would be ALOT of work. I would have to have 1 quarantine tank for frags and one quarantine tank for fish. The one for fish I can use meds and the one with the frags/rock i would not put meds or fish in so that the free swimming parasites would not find a host and die.

This is a very tedious and time consuming process and would truly test my patience. For what happened to my tank. Im sure the ich was always there but the fish were healthy enough to fend off the parasite and keep the numbers down and when I introduced a new Tang into my display who had no visible signs of ich it might have been stressed and as their reputation goes it was covered in the little buggars about 4 days later. I promptly took it out and hospitalized it. Then all of a sudden my other fish had it! I ended up building a larger hospital tank and started to treat all of them total of 5. Just about all of them died im sad to say. It all happened so fast all because I did not quarantine from the beginning... One thing is for sure we decided on a NO TANG policy for this tank.

[phippsj]

I have not quarantined 100% of the time. I now have flatworms and nudibranchs. Once those are eradicated, I will be quantining EVERYTHING. Every time. Period.

[Europhyllia]

In the past I sort of did it 50/50 for fish; never for coral.
Now that I am moving most everything to the new tank everything will be dipped and briefly quarantined.
I will be relying more than ever before on the dips and I also got a new UV sterilizer for the QT tank.
I won't be adding many new fish. A couple of pairs of jaw fish which usually respond well to dipping. Maybe a pair of gobies. That's it.
And I never keep tangs.
It's not just because of the ich. I feel that tangs tend to be real bothersome to other fish and I just don't like that. Happy, relaxed fish are healthy fish IMO. Tangs don't just introduce parasites, they also introduce stress in a lot of cases.

I didn't vote because I don't meet the 3 week QT criteria but I also won't go with totally skipping it.

[Regric25]

Good info and just to be clear its just in general for the quarantining, not specific to ich. There are different methods of doing it. So the 3 week period is not a criteria

[kkiel02]

I qt my fish for 2-3 weeks with copper and dip my corals. Got burned once(velvet) and dont want to again. I wish more lfs would do it as I wont have a qt tank for the new place so it really narrows down where I will be purchasing new fish.

I have to keep tangs in my tanks as they are my favorite fish with tons of personality. IME they havent bothered other species fish. My sailfin and purple did fight a little at first but now they wont leave each others side.

Im also a firm believer in every tank having ich though. It is just way too hard to keep out of a tank with the extremely long incubation that it can have. I tried extremely hard to make an ich free system and still ended up getting it(i believe it came in with coral).

Here is what I did and do now- I kept my tank fishless for about 2 months or 9 weeks. I even used a uv on the dt that I borrowed from Andrew(secretweapons) I had all my fish in a large rubbermaid tub with copper. I tested copper every water change for the qt to make sure I had the right levels. After the copper treatment I then returned the fish to the display and would qt every new fish in a 10 gallon basic setup I continually kept running from water changes on the display tank. I would dip my coral for about 10 minutes in kent tech d. Even though it said to only do 7 minutes and would usually boost the dose up quite a bit more than recommended(didnt bother the coral and I could see snails and pods after the dips so I knew it was working.

Even after all this I still have ich in the display and I assume it was transferred in on a frag. If I did it again I would setup a frag tank and dip the corals prior to placing them in that then leave them in there for another 3 weeks at least. I tried to find the website I came across that ran experiments on how long ich can stay dormant as I remember it was alot longer than 9 weeks but couldnt find it. If I do come across it again I will post it up.
So after all this I am now relying more on controlling ich than eradicating it. Hence the turbo twist 12x I will now use with the new tank.

[Regric25]

WOW 6 out of 24 people quarantine their livestock. I dont feel so bad anymore lol.

[ErikH]

I lost over 400 in fish from not QT'ing.

I am in the works of hoarding for a QT tank that will fit in my stand. My wife wont let me have it if it doesnt fit under the stand. It's going to get hairy down there at some point this year.

[Regric25]

ttt

[Mr Cob]

I lost over 400 in fish from not QT'ing.

I am in the works of hoarding for a QT tank that will fit in my stand. My wife wont let me have it if it doesnt fit under the stand. It's going to get hairy down there at some point this year.

Good thing you have a huge tank with a huge stand!

When you run out of room just buy a bigger stand...lol