I've seen mention of quarantine, as well as fresh water dips, for new fish.
Any recommendations please ?
Decontamination
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Gerwin
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I don't believe in the F/w dips, I tried all that back in the day with no more success than without. Matter a fact I'm not sure if I did not create more problems than I was trying to prevent.
Believe me I wanted it to work! So it was not from a negative preconception that I say....BLAH.
Quarantine, well that is a huge question. I think under certain situations its a good idea and would not discourage anyone from using quarantining techniques.
Again
I will draw on my now 28 years of retail experience.
I do not quarantine.
I lose less than 5% of my new stock every week to disease and of those that do die, well I can guess it about 99% of the time before I release them into our tanks, and place them in separate systems from the healthy stock.
Is observing a fish for a week in a store not a quarantine of sorts?
My biggest problem with quarantine tanks is most hobbyists that set them up are not informed by the seller that it is not a put up and use today situation. It is another ecosystem that must be established and healthy or you are just sending your new fish to certain doom. Now, not only has he been dragged across town and put into a new enviroment, its usually a 10 gal tank (exactly what we tell you not to set up a S/W tank in), no established bio filter, and then random use of antibiotics and such that kill what little bio filter you may have. You can use existing media from established tanks to make it quick and stable but few are explained this. I like the use of quarantine tanks when your tank becomes diseased and you must separate specimens for treatment that would effect your systems or kill certain species.
Now these are my thoughts, based solely on the fact that in 28 years I have experimented with many things to attempt to save fish which in turn saves me $$$$! so its high priority for me to try things that work and work fast and of course I've killed alot of fish too, which also gives me a good understanding of what works and what does not.
Bottom line, I did not read the info to get my opinions, I did not hear them from another source or read a blog on the net, I killed many and saved many and base my opinions on that and that alone
Believe me I wanted it to work! So it was not from a negative preconception that I say....BLAH.
Quarantine, well that is a huge question. I think under certain situations its a good idea and would not discourage anyone from using quarantining techniques.
Again
I will draw on my now 28 years of retail experience.
I do not quarantine.
I lose less than 5% of my new stock every week to disease and of those that do die, well I can guess it about 99% of the time before I release them into our tanks, and place them in separate systems from the healthy stock.
Is observing a fish for a week in a store not a quarantine of sorts?
My biggest problem with quarantine tanks is most hobbyists that set them up are not informed by the seller that it is not a put up and use today situation. It is another ecosystem that must be established and healthy or you are just sending your new fish to certain doom. Now, not only has he been dragged across town and put into a new enviroment, its usually a 10 gal tank (exactly what we tell you not to set up a S/W tank in), no established bio filter, and then random use of antibiotics and such that kill what little bio filter you may have. You can use existing media from established tanks to make it quick and stable but few are explained this. I like the use of quarantine tanks when your tank becomes diseased and you must separate specimens for treatment that would effect your systems or kill certain species.
Now these are my thoughts, based solely on the fact that in 28 years I have experimented with many things to attempt to save fish which in turn saves me $$$$! so its high priority for me to try things that work and work fast and of course I've killed alot of fish too, which also gives me a good understanding of what works and what does not.
Bottom line, I did not read the info to get my opinions, I did not hear them from another source or read a blog on the net, I killed many and saved many and base my opinions on that and that alone