Beginners Guide to Acclimation and Quarantine

mdd1986

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ok thanks. I like your approach of a freshwater dip at the 3 day mark prior to treating prazipro. If I see flukes I will treat if not I will treat with pazipro as you recommended. If no flukes I will just do the CP for 30 days.
 
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ok thanks. I like your approach of a freshwater dip at the 3 day mark prior to treating prazipro. If I see flukes I will treat if not I will treat with pazipro as you recommended. If no flukes I will just do the CP for 30 days.
Just remember to do a dip again after the 30 days, or at least toward the end of the 30 days. Doing it at the start is to check for a severe infestation that could impact the health of the fish immediately. Doing it at the end will show if there were just a handful that came with a fish. You really only need to do one fish if in a group since if one has them they all will. If one is clear they all should be clear.
 

mdd1986

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Just remember to do a dip again after the 30 days, or at least toward the end of the 30 days. Doing it at the start is to check for a severe infestation that could impact the health of the fish immediately. Doing it at the end will show if there were just a handful that came with a fish. You really only need to do one fish if in a group since if one has them they all will. If one is clear they all should be clear.

Awesome thank you for the tip.
 

mdd1986

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well flukes confirmed. I dipped both fish I had in my QT and one had alot of flukes floating in the water after the dip. Fish looked perfectly healthy and eating as well. I guess you never now for sure until you dip. Treating with pazipro now. The information in this thread is invaluable.
 
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well flukes confirmed. I dipped both fish I had in my QT and one had alot of flukes floating in the water after the dip. Fish looked perfectly healthy and eating as well. I guess you never now for sure until you dip. Treating with pazipro now. The information in this thread is invaluable.
I'm glad you found it useful!
 

Bthomas

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What's the best type of copper medication to use?
I've seen coppersafe and cupramine. Is there one that better then the others? are there any differences?
 

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Cupramine is "ionic" copper. Its therapeutic dose is .35 - .5ml/L (ppm), and the test kits you'd use to confirm that would be either by Seachem or Salifert.

Coppersafe is a brand of "chelated" copper, and can be somewhat more gentle with some fish. Its therapeutic dose is 1.5 - 2ml/L, and the appropriate test kits are API and CHEMetrics.

~Bruce
 
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What's the best type of copper medication to use?
I've seen coppersafe and cupramine. Is there one that better then the others? are there any differences?
Maritimer summed it up perfectly.

Cupramine is "ionic" copper. Its therapeutic dose is .35 - .5ml/L (ppm), and the test kits you'd use to confirm that would be either by Seachem or Salifert.

Coppersafe is a brand of "chelated" copper, and can be somewhat more gentle with some fish. Its therapeutic dose is 1.5 - 2ml/L, and the appropriate test kits are API and CHEMetrics.

~Bruce
The only thing I would add is to take a look at this chart. It shows how each species is likely to respond to each type of copper.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/fish-and-treatment-guidelines-with-chart.283450/
 

Bthomas

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Can anyone tell me what the shelf life is on medications like coppersafe and prazi?
Getting ready to place an order for some stuff to have on hand when i set up my 20 gallon quarantine but dont know how big of bottles i should get
 
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Can anyone tell me what the shelf life is on medications like coppersafe and prazi?
Getting ready to place an order for some stuff to have on hand when i set up my 20 gallon quarantine but dont know how big of bottles i should get
I don't know that Coppersafe has a shelf life. It will start to crystalize around the top after a year or two but my understanding is that it is still useable.
Prazipro has a shelf life of 5 years. Personally, I wouldn't use it after 2 to 3 years because it starts getting cloudy.
I believe Metroplex and Kanaplex have a shelf life of 2 years.
 

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Just read through this again.. I'm getting close to buying my first fish and am getting paranoid that I will mess something up with the acclimation/quarantine process.
I see here you say this is just the bare minimum quarantine and that if you were getting more sensitive fish you would do a more thorough quarantine..
I plan on adding a powder blue down the line so i dont want to only do the bare minimum but I only plan on having one quarantine tank set up. What would be the more thorough quarantine method?
 
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Just read through this again.. I'm getting close to buying my first fish and am getting paranoid that I will mess something up with the acclimation/quarantine process.
I see here you say this is just the bare minimum quarantine and that if you were getting more sensitive fish you would do a more thorough quarantine..
I plan on adding a powder blue down the line so i dont want to only do the bare minimum but I only plan on having one quarantine tank set up. What would be the more thorough quarantine method?
I recommend reading this for a more thorough QT practice.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/how-to-quarantine.189815/
 

TheEngineer

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Hmmm.. this is really interesting. It is almost like TTM and copper combined. I am on my way up to therapeutic copper levels (day 5 of 10 with my wrasse in there using copper power) and was planning to sit there for 30 days. You’re saying the same effect can be had after 14 days and then a transfer?

That’s awesome!
 
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Hmmm.. this is really interesting. It is almost like TTM and copper combined. I am on my way up to therapeutic copper levels (day 5 of 10 with my wrasse in there using copper power) and was planning to sit there for 30 days. You’re saying the same effect can be had after 14 days and then a transfer?

That’s awesome!
That is correct. The extra time for copper treatment is to take out the cyst form of the parasites. If you remove the fish from them while still at full copper levels then you don't need to worry about it.
 

TheEngineer

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Amazing. Now I get my fish in the tank two weeks faster :) I did two rounds of Prazipro up front as part of my usual process. Just a month left to go now instead of 6 weeks. Awesome sauce.
 

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I'm so sorry you had to go through that. :(

And I really can't stress enough that what I laid out here is the absolute bare minimum I would recommend. For people planning difficult to keep species or very large displays, I recommend much more thorough QT practices.

Seeing as this one is so fantastic, do you have a write up for that scenario too ?
 
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Seeing as this one is so fantastic, do you have a write up for that scenario too ?
Thanks! I do not. There is a lot of good information in the Fish Disease section. Maybe I will take the time to try and organize all the different parts into one comprehensive article.
 

Bthomas

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Just added my first fish to quarantine (exciting day!) and was reading back through this and had some questions.

I see that u said to fill a 1 gallon jug and add 1.8ml of coppersafe to test to get the correct color on the api test kit but where does the 1.8ml come from?
On the bottle it says to use 5ml for 4 gallons so wouldnt that be 1.25ml per gallon for therapeutic level?

Also u said u make up 4 gallons of water and add 5ml coppersafe to that for changing salinity (this matches up with the bottle) but I would probably only keep gallon jugs made up at a time for that purpose so would i then put 1.8ml in each gallon or 1.25?

My qt is a 20 gallon tank but it isn't kept completely full and I did not measure the gallons it took to fill to the level it is so how would i go about figuring how much total copper i would need to add to get to the correct level?

Hope all this makes sense
 
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Just added my first fish to quarantine (exciting day!) and was reading back through this and had some questions.

I see that u said to fill a 1 gallon jug and add 1.8ml of coppersafe to test to get the correct color on the api test kit but where does the 1.8ml come from?
On the bottle it says to use 5ml for 4 gallons so wouldnt that be 1.25ml per gallon for therapeutic level?

Also u said u make up 4 gallons of water and add 5ml coppersafe to that for changing salinity (this matches up with the bottle) but I would probably only keep gallon jugs made up at a time for that purpose so would i then put 1.8ml in each gallon or 1.25?

My qt is a 20 gallon tank but it isn't kept completely full and I did not measure the gallons it took to fill to the level it is so how would i go about figuring how much total copper i would need to add to get to the correct level?

Hope all this makes sense
I did recommend 1.8ml. I don't agree with Fritz dosing recommendation. I had a long email exchange with them and they agree that they have no evidence their recommended dosing works and said they are doing testing to offer new guidance. If you look, they claim that the recommended copper dose is something like 0.25 to 0.30ppm copper. However, they also have told me that 1.25ml/g is 1.16ppm. Very frustrating. So I go off of the testing the Humblefish did saying that 1.5ppm to 2.oppm is the correct dose. That is where the 1.8ml/g comes from.
 
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