Quarantine ???
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sissy
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I don't really like salt for anything as it can sometimes irritate the fish because of adding to much ,(which is easy to do )I usually keep fish in just a clean tank with a little peroxide and pond water with a quilt batting filter and 1 extra air stone from my pond .I watch them closely for 6 to 8 weeks .But I don't bring new fish into my pond ,I am usually giving baby fish away .I even do the same to plants .Clean the roots and watch them and add a little peroxide .
mrsclem
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I actually just did a first quarantine tank last year for a koi I got that was in a tank where all other fish had been ill and died. Just kept an eye on him for any sigh of illness as the nursery where I got him from had been dumping treatments in. Air & filtration only.
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Our technique is proactively based and uses the life cycle approach for parasites. It is an empirical approach with criteria just like in a hospital. It doesn’t address viruses because viruses cannot be cured. For kHv, only buy from kHv protocol farms. If the water is 75 degrees or greater and the fish manifests kHv, it must be destroyed because if alive it is a carrier. So heat the water to 80 and treat. Scrape and scope the slime coat to look for existing parasites. You could gill and fin clip but I don’t because it involves anesthesia. Your choice.
For the rest use a life cycle timing for empirical treatment. For example, the life cycle for ick in warm water is 8 days, so treating the water with proform c or terminate for 10 days will kill all ick tomites transiting from a cyst to the fish. That time will also wipe out the rest of the parasitic bacteria. Two rounds of praziquantel over 4 days will wipe out all nematodes and trematodes. A single treatment of dimilin wipes out all crustaceans like anchor worms. As long as the fish is behaving normally and eating after that, what do you need to do? Waiting for 3 to 6 months changes nothing.
Make sure you place a fish already in your school in the tank. Your fish could transmit something the the new guy.
Anyway, that’s what we do for what that’s worth.
For the rest use a life cycle timing for empirical treatment. For example, the life cycle for ick in warm water is 8 days, so treating the water with proform c or terminate for 10 days will kill all ick tomites transiting from a cyst to the fish. That time will also wipe out the rest of the parasitic bacteria. Two rounds of praziquantel over 4 days will wipe out all nematodes and trematodes. A single treatment of dimilin wipes out all crustaceans like anchor worms. As long as the fish is behaving normally and eating after that, what do you need to do? Waiting for 3 to 6 months changes nothing.
Make sure you place a fish already in your school in the tank. Your fish could transmit something the the new guy.
Anyway, that’s what we do for what that’s worth.
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I don't add new fish to my pond, get more then enough fry. The few new fish I have just bought are in a totally independent pond where they will stay.
It is important to make sure they are healthy before adding to your pond.
It is important to make sure they are healthy before adding to your pond.
That's an important point that I think people often miss. They quarantine the new fish to protect the current fish, but forget that their existing fish could also infect the new fish.
@carolinaguy - is this a method you use in a retail setting?
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I don't have a retail setting. but that said, it would be wise for a retailer to expose new fish to fish in their existing operation. they should also scrape and scope incoming fish but none do that i know of.
Just curious - your quarantine protocol sounded intense!
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Intense maybe, but its based on science. human medicine organizes this way. if you are in intensive care, they have a set of criteria, and when you meet these criteria, no fever for a period of time, stable heart readings, good blood stats, or whatever is applicable, then they determine that you do not need this more intense level of care and they move you to a regular nursing ward. when you meet the criteria there, they send you to another level of care or to your home which in a way a level of care. same with fish.
when i get a fish i apply an empirical standard which means i dont have to see a bug to decide that there is or might be a bug. its like hair lice. the doctor doesnt need to do a bunch biopsy and put the sample under a microscope to see the lice. if the kid is scratching, and there are egg pods on the hair, then its head lice. so i decide that the fish is a candidate for bacteria. i never buy from a vendor unless they use the KHV standard to prevent infection, so i don't fight the KHV fight except to raise the water temperature to a level that manifests the virus. then i hammer the bacteria and worms. when the quarantine is done the bug wont be alive. then i scrape and scope because i can. if there are no moving organisms, the fish is free to go.
if you quarantine for 6 months and release without scraping and scoping, then you havent quarantined. you have just waited. waiting doesnt cure anything. it just waits for the fish to die.
when i get a fish i apply an empirical standard which means i dont have to see a bug to decide that there is or might be a bug. its like hair lice. the doctor doesnt need to do a bunch biopsy and put the sample under a microscope to see the lice. if the kid is scratching, and there are egg pods on the hair, then its head lice. so i decide that the fish is a candidate for bacteria. i never buy from a vendor unless they use the KHV standard to prevent infection, so i don't fight the KHV fight except to raise the water temperature to a level that manifests the virus. then i hammer the bacteria and worms. when the quarantine is done the bug wont be alive. then i scrape and scope because i can. if there are no moving organisms, the fish is free to go.
if you quarantine for 6 months and release without scraping and scoping, then you havent quarantined. you have just waited. waiting doesnt cure anything. it just waits for the fish to die.
Mmathis
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When I first joined GPF, and was trying to “figure out” the science behind QT, I came to the conclusion that the 4-week minimum was based on a life-cycle theory. Though, my QT was more for isolation and observation.
Well, the only argument I have with your approach (if I understand it) is that you are treating all fish as if they are carrying bacteria and parasites. If I'm in the hospital, it's because I have a problem and hopefully they only treat me for that problem, and not all other potential illnesses that others may also have manifested while in the hospital. Your head lice example included "there are egg pods on the hair" - that's an observable manifestation of an infestation. If you had said "the kid was itching therefore it's head lice with no other observable signs" I'd say you jumped the gun.
I think waiting and observing can tell you a lot about whether a fish is healthy. If you want to add a scrape to that, that's fine. But medicating every fish as if it's infected seems like overkill. But that's the opinion of someone who has never quarantined a fish - we added all our fish at one time. The only other additions have been pond-born and they pass automatically.
I think waiting and observing can tell you a lot about whether a fish is healthy. If you want to add a scrape to that, that's fine. But medicating every fish as if it's infected seems like overkill. But that's the opinion of someone who has never quarantined a fish - we added all our fish at one time. The only other additions have been pond-born and they pass automatically.
This is where I got in trouble in the planted tank world. A good friend of mine was crazy about qt as well and I was more into natural health. He came down with ick in his tank and insisted on using the marisin I believe it is for ick but kills so much more. And I believed in optimum water quality and feeding along with lots of plants both aquatic and bog . yes bog in an aquarium, I'm including a couple links to specific pages as examples https://www.aquariacentral.com/foru...m-unsure-but-i-think-youll-like.110988/page-7
https://www.aquariacentral.com/foru...-unsure-but-i-think-youll-like.110988/page-11
My friend with the ick wouldn't listen taking the pesticide route and to prove my point I gave his 4 of my fish and before he medicated he placed them in his tank so I could show him that the parasites were not going to effect them, but if they were to stay in the water where the parameters were OFF that they too would eventually start showing signs of ick. after a couple weeks they did start showing signs and with no quarantine tank I placed them back in my tank after only giving them a little start right in the container before being added back to the tank . within days the ick was gone. Bu at night I would shine a flash light in the tank from the top and there were the parasites swimming around but were not on the fish. I think this is where the sterile koi keepers are compared to the ponders where we lean more toward mother nature helping out over the medications . it's like I tell my wife every time she thinks the dogs have the sniffles give them a day or two and see where they land they are Animals not weak humans.
https://www.aquariacentral.com/foru...-unsure-but-i-think-youll-like.110988/page-11
My friend with the ick wouldn't listen taking the pesticide route and to prove my point I gave his 4 of my fish and before he medicated he placed them in his tank so I could show him that the parasites were not going to effect them, but if they were to stay in the water where the parameters were OFF that they too would eventually start showing signs of ick. after a couple weeks they did start showing signs and with no quarantine tank I placed them back in my tank after only giving them a little start right in the container before being added back to the tank . within days the ick was gone. Bu at night I would shine a flash light in the tank from the top and there were the parasites swimming around but were not on the fish. I think this is where the sterile koi keepers are compared to the ponders where we lean more toward mother nature helping out over the medications . it's like I tell my wife every time she thinks the dogs have the sniffles give them a day or two and see where they land they are Animals not weak humans.
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Well, the only argument I have with your approach (if I understand it) is that you are treating all fish as if they are carrying bacteria and parasites. If I'm in the hospital, it's because I have a problem and hopefully they only treat me for that problem, and not all other potential illnesses that others may also have manifested while in the hospital. Your head lice example included "there are egg pods on the hair" - that's an observable manifestation of an infestation. If you had said "the kid was itching therefore it's head lice with no other observable signs" I'd say you jumped the gun.
I think waiting and observing can tell you a lot about whether a fish is healthy. If you want to add a scrape to that, that's fine. But medicating every fish as if it's infected seems like overkill. But that's the opinion of someone who has never quarantined a fish - we added all our fish at one time. The only other additions have been pond-born and they pass automatically.
Your point is well taken. I am assuming that the fish has something that can be eliminated, and this approach appears to be excessive. No argument here. Over time I have just come to the conclusion that detection and symptom manifestation have failed us maybe 10 percent of the time. A scrape is a sample of mucus and not a 100 percent observation, and we have missed detection in the past. Behavioral presentation also drags out the process, and we have busy lives, so again we miss detection. We had a club member who bought from a vendor who quarantines, and they held the fish in passive quarantine for a while. They even used some salt and another antibacterial that we don’t use. A month or so later she had the strangest problems including color change in two prize fish that ruined their look. Their pure white changed to baby diaper yellow. I’ve never seen this before and still am not sure of the cause. Anyway, I scraped and found a significant chidonella infestation along with an organism I can only describe as a Death Star. There were dozens of Death Stars that are about 100 times larger than chidonella. The Death Star is not in the literature anywhere I looked. It has cilia all around and just sits there and spins. Didn’t have my microscope camera set up to photograph.
So we quarantine using assumptions because reality misses on occasion. I agree with MMathis on the period. So we use the old body shop technique for car painting. We mask and blast because we aren’t perfect.