DucaMonster
New Member
This year I rebooted an older tank I had before I moved homes a couple years ago. In this new system, I am determined to not make the same mistakes I made on the previous tanks, and a proper quarantine procedure is of upmost importance to me for this go around. Unfortunately, it was far from an easy journey to create an easy and effective process. I had to create my own process, similar, but unlike any other quarantine process, and far from a “common” process.
I have never in my life researched a topic that had as much misinformation spread among the internet, as a quarantine procedure. If you Google it, several of the top results and even AI give scientifically disproven advice. It is tough to just determine the right medication let alone the right process.
The Perfect Procedure
Ok, maybe not perfect, but we are hobbyists, and 95% is about all we are going to get, and this process achieves that with reasonable equipment and time. The extra 5% can be left to those trailblazers that are willing to dip a fish in hydrogen peroxide (not me).
Equipment and supplies needed:
(2) 10 gallon glass aquariums
1 small power head
(2) 100 watt submersible heaters with internal thermostats (oversized)
Bubbler with stone
Large Bottle Chelated Copper (Copper Power/ Coppersafe)
Prazipro
Small black bottom container or bucket
PVC hides
Ambient light for the fish
Purple Bucket Instant Ocean
Sharpie
Quick version
Freshwater dip, RODI only
2.5 PPM chelated copper for 14 days with powerhead in 34 PPT
Tank transfer every 4 days with copper
Then, Prazipro every 3 days for a total of 9 days (optional)
Day 1:
1: Acclimate fish:
Fill the first 10g aquarium (tank 1) with an actual 10g of water, not a guess. 34 PPT salinity.
Add the equipment and let it stabilize with the powerhead running to 78 degrees.
Acclimate the new fish to this tank, and when ready, transfer the fish to the tank, only the fish, no water.
Please note, there are no medications in this tank as of yet. I feel is it helpful to acclimate a fish from questionable water quality to clean water. Let the fish be for a few to reduce stress.
2: Freshwater dip:
Find a 1 gallon black or dark bottom container, I use a plastic storage container.
Fill a 1 gallon Freezer Ziplock bag with RODI water and float in the quarantine tank (may have to remove a little water from the tank to keep from overflowing)
Let temperature settle and when ready, pour into the container and drop a bubbler in for at least 10 minutes. Some recommend PH monitoring and buffering.
Scoop up the fish with a net and do a freshwater dip. It must be done for 5 minutes, even if the fish scares you, they are fine. You are looking for flukes primarily, but a velvet infested fish will show white dots for a few seconds at about the 4 minute mark. Flukes look like big scales peeling off, some flukes are too small to see. The freshwater dip gives the fish some time for the medications to work, and tells you if you need to treat for flukes. Some fish look healthy but are only a few hours from succumbing to velvet.
3: Add Copper
While the fish is in the freshwater dip, add 14.5 ML of Copper Power to the output of the powerhead in the 10g tank. This will be just less than 2.5 PPM copper level. Use a syringe.
When the freshwater dip is complete, return the fish to the 10g tank and write on the tank the date the tank was started, and Copper level.
Day 2:
Feed the fish a minimal amount. Feed daily from here, do not pollute the tank. Less food is better. They can be fattened up in the display tank. Multiple small feedings are better than 1 larger feeding.
Day 3:
Set up the second 10g aquarium with freshly mixed saltwater to the exact same salinity tank 1 is currently at. Add the heater and drop the powerhead in, if you don’t have another powerhead, drop the bubbler in Tank 1. If a fish is in the tank, it must have a powerhead or bubbler going.
Day 4:
Tank transfer day, it must be done every 4 days, no if ands or buts about it.
Tank 2 should have been running for several hours at this point and parameters should be good. Drop in the 14.5 ML of Copper Power into the power head, and let it distribute.
Transfer the fish over with a net, no need to acclimate, as the parameters must be identical anyway. Drain and clean out Tank 1. Bleach and cleaners are not necessary, just wash over a sink and scrub clean. Dry the tank and heater completely and let it sit empty and dry for the next 2 days. Any parasites that fell off the fish to continue the life cycle would be on the bottom of the tank or down the drain and now dead.
Day 5-13:
Repeat Tank Transfer and add copper to each tank every four days. Remember to write the date and copper level to avoid confusion or double doses.
Day 14:
Congrats the fish is alive! You have successfully quarantined a fish and have done more than 90% of the community for fish health, and your fish certainly appreciate it. Not just the new fish, all your fish. As you can see you have done nothing that would be severely negative on the fish, but has a near 100% effective rate for Ich and velvet.
You can end the process here if the freshwater dip showed no signs of parasites, but best practice would continue with a different type of parasite control, for the longer term irritants for the fish. Just because you did not see the flukes, does not mean it did not have microscopic gill flukes.
Set up the empty tank with clean freshly mixed water, and instead of dosing the chelated copper, you will dose prazipro to the labeled directions. Prazipro is a little different, and it leaves the water in 2-5 days by means of bacterial breakdown. It should not create a bacterial bloom, as the tank was close to sterile before we began. Prazipro should be re-dosed every 3 days to remain effective against hatching eggs, so I do a TTM every 3 days and re-dose the clean water for a total of 3 doses.
When ready to move to the display tank, you must do an acclimation period, as your display does not match freshly mixed purple bucket parameters.
Benefits of this method:
Easy and effective
This method combines TTM and traditional medications, providing the benefits of both, and eliminating the big negatives of both. TTM requires sterile environments and straight medications can be hard on the fish due to ammonia, bacteria and salinity swings.
Limited resources
You just need two tank setups (about $100) and simple medications.
No copper test kits are required
Limited space requirements
You just need a counter, or even a floor for 2 tanks
Everyone can make space for this, there are way too many comments about not enough space, don’t make excuses, make choices.
Easy on the fish
Chelated copper is copper that is bound to amino acids or other compounds, making it much safer than the older community remembers, and even delicate fish have no issues with these doses.
Simple
No need to understand 30 different product directions and when to use what product.
This method is really hard to mess up.
Quick
14 days is not a long time in this hobby, patience is the greatest source of success for a reef.
Closing Thoughts
This method was created after endless hours of research, and fact checking many ideas.
The basis is from Bulk Reef Supply and Marine Collectors process. Credit is due to them, but this process is easier and more effective.
Copper
Copper is an amazing metal, as it releases ions directly to microscopic cells like bacteria and tiny parasites that destroys the cells ability to replicate, and in higher doses destroys the cells membrane. It is poisonous to us and fish at high levels, but way over the treatments here.
There are 2 forms of copper.
Ionic, copper molecules suspended in water and free to react with anything and everything very quickly. It degrades in the water column at an unpredictable rate and must be monitored daily.
Chelated Copper is the same copper ions that have been mixed chemically with amino acids or other more complex molecule chains that do not react as aggressively as they are bound up. These complex chains do not leave the water quickly, and monitoring the levels for reductions is not necessary to remain at therapeutic levels. Chelated Copper can be used on some species identified as sensitive to copper. Since Chelated is bound up and released slowly, it requires significantly more PPM to be effective.
Copper cannot be used on any invertebrates, as they are too simple of creatures and it effects them exactly like the parasite we are targeting.
It is useful on almost all saltwater fish including dwarf angels.
Wrasses are sensitive to spikes in copper and should brought up to a full dose slowly and monitored for labored breathing that may indicate a copper sensitivity. Start at 1.0 PPM and stop at 2.0 PPM for these species or any other species you are worried about. Copper Power as a company has indicated 1.5 PPM is effective and 2.5 PPM may be unnecessary high, but Marine Collectors uses 2.65 PPM.
Think of copper as blocking the ability of cells to replicate. It is very damaging to simple organisms that must replicate themselves daily, but not damaging to fish and us, that don’t need to replicate most of our cells daily, and can repair the damage over time.
Other medications, copper substitutes, are simply not as effective, I have seen velvet escape 2 weeks of other treatments.
Copper works at a very basic level, unlike miracle products which work by specially targeting certain things.
Chloroquine Phosphate
Chloroquine Phosphate is human pharmaceutical drug used to treat malaria. It can be used to treat external parasites as an alternative to Copper. It works by essentially blocking up the "bowels", and starving the parasite to death.
It became popular with self Covid cures during the pandemic and made headlines.
There is just not enough science to hold my breath, but has shown promise, or luck, I am not sure which as of yet. There are too many species of parasite we are fighting.
Invertebrates
Invertebrates only need observation for a short period before being introduced. The observation is to reduce any hitchhiker parasite that may, by chance be on the animal. Do not do this process with an invert.
Tanks
A 10g aquarium is just fine for almost every fish you can buy at your LFS. If it can freely swim, eat and not over pollute the tank in 4 days, it is fine. Using larger tanks is just not practical for this method. Smaller is not recommended, as ammonia control is a vital aspect of the methods success.
If you place your dog in a kennel for a few days and it died, would you blame the kennel and say it died of stress? Yet aquarists blame the aquarium for deaths in the short term.
Bubbler/Powerhead
A bubbler is a staple of quarantines but is also a big problem.
There are reports of velvet potentially spreading to other tanks in the same room. Look over your tank with the bubbler on and you will see why that may be possible. It is aerosolizing the water with a parasite and transferring via air to a nearby tank. Certainly far-fetched, but possible. Using a power head eliminates that from being a possibility.
POWERHEAD IS REQUIRED, not using a power head when adding the copper is a way to directly kill your fish. Without full and equal distribution, some areas of the tank will be well over 10 PPM, a potentially lethal dose to a fish’s gills.
Water
It would be best practice to mix all the water you will need for the entire process and store in a larger Rubbermaid since we are not acclimating the fish each time, I find it unnecessary, as the salinity will swing with evaporation anyway, and I like to dose the copper directly to the tank to be certain of the level. You should use Instant Ocean purple bucket as it has the lowest parameters, and less chance of unwanted interaction with the copper or Prazipro. This process requires a lot of water, but that is whole point, as we are trying to move the fish away from the parasitic infested water. The saltwater mix must sit for several hours with a powerhead to completely dissolve and come to temperature.
No Biological Filtration?
Nope, no biological filtration is required, or wanted. Do not place any live rock, bioballs or HOB filter into the tank. It is simply not necessary, and only causes harm. If you are concerned about ammonia levels, do a Tank Transfer (TT) every 3 days. Adding live rock introduces bacteria (which was the goal) but the bacteria may be doing negative things to your medication or the oxygen levels. You are also adding a new place for the parasites to live that cannot be sanitized, and you may potentially infect your display tank when you place those back in your sump where they came from. Do not move anything to a new tank that could have a living parasite on it.
Remember feed takes several days to break down to ammonia, so we are really only concerned about the fish excretions of ammonia, which is released at a consistent calculable rate.
Bacteria in a bottle products wont hurt anything and can be added since they contain limited bacteria strains.
14 days, not 30, 60, 90?
30 days is simply unnecessary,
Studying the life cycle of the problematic parasites, and factoring the Tank Transfer and freshwater dip resets, most of the parasites are completely eliminated in 10 days or less. The extra 4 is just for more confidence. The tank transfer every 4 days is vitally important for several reasons, not just ammonia.
With the tank transfer, we just need to look at the time the parasite stays on the fish, and how long it stays off the fish. The 4 days breaks the cycle, and copper assures all else are unable to continue. Each type of parasite is different, velvet is fast, and Ich is slow. The Tank Transfer by itself does not work well for the fast types, but complete elimination occurs quickly when we remove all of the parasites attempting breeding on the bottom of the tank and let the copper do its thing.
I want to do more than 1 fish at a time!
This process can be scaled, by either adding more fish to the tank (not recommended) or by having additional tanks, you just need 1 tank per fish plus 1. Stagger the tank transfer days.
Hyposalinity
Hypo is method in of itself, and there is significant demand to try to combine hypo with other medications because it must be more better! If you want to run Hypo, run hypo as your method, but do not combine copper and hypo. When the salinity is reduced, so are the compounds in the water, giving the copper less to react with, and forcing the copper to react with the fish’s gills at a higher rate. Unless you go significantly hypo, it has almost no effect on the bad parasites, but does make it significantly more stressful or even deadly on the fish.
Other diseases?
This method treats parasites; Ich, Velvet, Uronema and flukes.
It may not eliminate Uronema and does not work for bacterial infections, so if you can identify a parasite, treat directly for that parasite after this procedure.
Quarantine vs observation
Websters is not a fan of aquarists, as we are not using the term quarantine for what is actually means. To saltwater aquarists, quarantine means to isolate and eliminate pests from incoming stock. If you place the fish in clean water isolating it from the display tank for two weeks, Webster will be proud to say you quarantined, but you did not.
Observation after this process is not necessary, as the devastating or quickly to infect parasites are pretty much guaranteed to be eliminated.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to kill a fish in quarantine, but please don’t blame quarantine in general, problem solve and improve. Quarantine saves fish’s lives, and maybe more, your tanks success rate. I hope this process will keep happy fish for years to come.
Please post about anything you disagree with or would like to add. I just thought it might be beneficial to share my solutions to all the information I have sorted through.
Additional information
https://www.marinecollectors.com/pages/new-our-methods-quarantine-protocols
https://www.mantasystems.net/a/blog/post/ChloroquinePhosphate
www.reef2reef.com
https://humble.fish/community/threads/tank-transfer-method.26/
https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/12-4-7-quinine/
www.reef2reef.com
I have never in my life researched a topic that had as much misinformation spread among the internet, as a quarantine procedure. If you Google it, several of the top results and even AI give scientifically disproven advice. It is tough to just determine the right medication let alone the right process.
The Perfect Procedure
Ok, maybe not perfect, but we are hobbyists, and 95% is about all we are going to get, and this process achieves that with reasonable equipment and time. The extra 5% can be left to those trailblazers that are willing to dip a fish in hydrogen peroxide (not me).
Equipment and supplies needed:
(2) 10 gallon glass aquariums
1 small power head
(2) 100 watt submersible heaters with internal thermostats (oversized)
Bubbler with stone
Large Bottle Chelated Copper (Copper Power/ Coppersafe)
Prazipro
Small black bottom container or bucket
PVC hides
Ambient light for the fish
Purple Bucket Instant Ocean
Sharpie
Quick version
Freshwater dip, RODI only
2.5 PPM chelated copper for 14 days with powerhead in 34 PPT
Tank transfer every 4 days with copper
Then, Prazipro every 3 days for a total of 9 days (optional)
Day 1:
1: Acclimate fish:
Fill the first 10g aquarium (tank 1) with an actual 10g of water, not a guess. 34 PPT salinity.
Add the equipment and let it stabilize with the powerhead running to 78 degrees.
Acclimate the new fish to this tank, and when ready, transfer the fish to the tank, only the fish, no water.
Please note, there are no medications in this tank as of yet. I feel is it helpful to acclimate a fish from questionable water quality to clean water. Let the fish be for a few to reduce stress.
2: Freshwater dip:
Find a 1 gallon black or dark bottom container, I use a plastic storage container.
Fill a 1 gallon Freezer Ziplock bag with RODI water and float in the quarantine tank (may have to remove a little water from the tank to keep from overflowing)
Let temperature settle and when ready, pour into the container and drop a bubbler in for at least 10 minutes. Some recommend PH monitoring and buffering.
Scoop up the fish with a net and do a freshwater dip. It must be done for 5 minutes, even if the fish scares you, they are fine. You are looking for flukes primarily, but a velvet infested fish will show white dots for a few seconds at about the 4 minute mark. Flukes look like big scales peeling off, some flukes are too small to see. The freshwater dip gives the fish some time for the medications to work, and tells you if you need to treat for flukes. Some fish look healthy but are only a few hours from succumbing to velvet.
3: Add Copper
While the fish is in the freshwater dip, add 14.5 ML of Copper Power to the output of the powerhead in the 10g tank. This will be just less than 2.5 PPM copper level. Use a syringe.
When the freshwater dip is complete, return the fish to the 10g tank and write on the tank the date the tank was started, and Copper level.
Day 2:
Feed the fish a minimal amount. Feed daily from here, do not pollute the tank. Less food is better. They can be fattened up in the display tank. Multiple small feedings are better than 1 larger feeding.
Day 3:
Set up the second 10g aquarium with freshly mixed saltwater to the exact same salinity tank 1 is currently at. Add the heater and drop the powerhead in, if you don’t have another powerhead, drop the bubbler in Tank 1. If a fish is in the tank, it must have a powerhead or bubbler going.
Day 4:
Tank transfer day, it must be done every 4 days, no if ands or buts about it.
Tank 2 should have been running for several hours at this point and parameters should be good. Drop in the 14.5 ML of Copper Power into the power head, and let it distribute.
Transfer the fish over with a net, no need to acclimate, as the parameters must be identical anyway. Drain and clean out Tank 1. Bleach and cleaners are not necessary, just wash over a sink and scrub clean. Dry the tank and heater completely and let it sit empty and dry for the next 2 days. Any parasites that fell off the fish to continue the life cycle would be on the bottom of the tank or down the drain and now dead.
Day 5-13:
Repeat Tank Transfer and add copper to each tank every four days. Remember to write the date and copper level to avoid confusion or double doses.
Day 14:
Congrats the fish is alive! You have successfully quarantined a fish and have done more than 90% of the community for fish health, and your fish certainly appreciate it. Not just the new fish, all your fish. As you can see you have done nothing that would be severely negative on the fish, but has a near 100% effective rate for Ich and velvet.
You can end the process here if the freshwater dip showed no signs of parasites, but best practice would continue with a different type of parasite control, for the longer term irritants for the fish. Just because you did not see the flukes, does not mean it did not have microscopic gill flukes.
Set up the empty tank with clean freshly mixed water, and instead of dosing the chelated copper, you will dose prazipro to the labeled directions. Prazipro is a little different, and it leaves the water in 2-5 days by means of bacterial breakdown. It should not create a bacterial bloom, as the tank was close to sterile before we began. Prazipro should be re-dosed every 3 days to remain effective against hatching eggs, so I do a TTM every 3 days and re-dose the clean water for a total of 3 doses.
When ready to move to the display tank, you must do an acclimation period, as your display does not match freshly mixed purple bucket parameters.
Benefits of this method:
Easy and effective
This method combines TTM and traditional medications, providing the benefits of both, and eliminating the big negatives of both. TTM requires sterile environments and straight medications can be hard on the fish due to ammonia, bacteria and salinity swings.
Limited resources
You just need two tank setups (about $100) and simple medications.
No copper test kits are required
Limited space requirements
You just need a counter, or even a floor for 2 tanks
Everyone can make space for this, there are way too many comments about not enough space, don’t make excuses, make choices.
Easy on the fish
Chelated copper is copper that is bound to amino acids or other compounds, making it much safer than the older community remembers, and even delicate fish have no issues with these doses.
Simple
No need to understand 30 different product directions and when to use what product.
This method is really hard to mess up.
Quick
14 days is not a long time in this hobby, patience is the greatest source of success for a reef.
Closing Thoughts
This method was created after endless hours of research, and fact checking many ideas.
The basis is from Bulk Reef Supply and Marine Collectors process. Credit is due to them, but this process is easier and more effective.
Copper
Copper is an amazing metal, as it releases ions directly to microscopic cells like bacteria and tiny parasites that destroys the cells ability to replicate, and in higher doses destroys the cells membrane. It is poisonous to us and fish at high levels, but way over the treatments here.
There are 2 forms of copper.
Ionic, copper molecules suspended in water and free to react with anything and everything very quickly. It degrades in the water column at an unpredictable rate and must be monitored daily.
Chelated Copper is the same copper ions that have been mixed chemically with amino acids or other more complex molecule chains that do not react as aggressively as they are bound up. These complex chains do not leave the water quickly, and monitoring the levels for reductions is not necessary to remain at therapeutic levels. Chelated Copper can be used on some species identified as sensitive to copper. Since Chelated is bound up and released slowly, it requires significantly more PPM to be effective.
Copper cannot be used on any invertebrates, as they are too simple of creatures and it effects them exactly like the parasite we are targeting.
It is useful on almost all saltwater fish including dwarf angels.
Wrasses are sensitive to spikes in copper and should brought up to a full dose slowly and monitored for labored breathing that may indicate a copper sensitivity. Start at 1.0 PPM and stop at 2.0 PPM for these species or any other species you are worried about. Copper Power as a company has indicated 1.5 PPM is effective and 2.5 PPM may be unnecessary high, but Marine Collectors uses 2.65 PPM.
Think of copper as blocking the ability of cells to replicate. It is very damaging to simple organisms that must replicate themselves daily, but not damaging to fish and us, that don’t need to replicate most of our cells daily, and can repair the damage over time.
Other medications, copper substitutes, are simply not as effective, I have seen velvet escape 2 weeks of other treatments.
Copper works at a very basic level, unlike miracle products which work by specially targeting certain things.
Chloroquine Phosphate
Chloroquine Phosphate is human pharmaceutical drug used to treat malaria. It can be used to treat external parasites as an alternative to Copper. It works by essentially blocking up the "bowels", and starving the parasite to death.
It became popular with self Covid cures during the pandemic and made headlines.
There is just not enough science to hold my breath, but has shown promise, or luck, I am not sure which as of yet. There are too many species of parasite we are fighting.
Invertebrates
Invertebrates only need observation for a short period before being introduced. The observation is to reduce any hitchhiker parasite that may, by chance be on the animal. Do not do this process with an invert.
Tanks
A 10g aquarium is just fine for almost every fish you can buy at your LFS. If it can freely swim, eat and not over pollute the tank in 4 days, it is fine. Using larger tanks is just not practical for this method. Smaller is not recommended, as ammonia control is a vital aspect of the methods success.
If you place your dog in a kennel for a few days and it died, would you blame the kennel and say it died of stress? Yet aquarists blame the aquarium for deaths in the short term.
Bubbler/Powerhead
A bubbler is a staple of quarantines but is also a big problem.
There are reports of velvet potentially spreading to other tanks in the same room. Look over your tank with the bubbler on and you will see why that may be possible. It is aerosolizing the water with a parasite and transferring via air to a nearby tank. Certainly far-fetched, but possible. Using a power head eliminates that from being a possibility.
POWERHEAD IS REQUIRED, not using a power head when adding the copper is a way to directly kill your fish. Without full and equal distribution, some areas of the tank will be well over 10 PPM, a potentially lethal dose to a fish’s gills.
Water
It would be best practice to mix all the water you will need for the entire process and store in a larger Rubbermaid since we are not acclimating the fish each time, I find it unnecessary, as the salinity will swing with evaporation anyway, and I like to dose the copper directly to the tank to be certain of the level. You should use Instant Ocean purple bucket as it has the lowest parameters, and less chance of unwanted interaction with the copper or Prazipro. This process requires a lot of water, but that is whole point, as we are trying to move the fish away from the parasitic infested water. The saltwater mix must sit for several hours with a powerhead to completely dissolve and come to temperature.
No Biological Filtration?
Nope, no biological filtration is required, or wanted. Do not place any live rock, bioballs or HOB filter into the tank. It is simply not necessary, and only causes harm. If you are concerned about ammonia levels, do a Tank Transfer (TT) every 3 days. Adding live rock introduces bacteria (which was the goal) but the bacteria may be doing negative things to your medication or the oxygen levels. You are also adding a new place for the parasites to live that cannot be sanitized, and you may potentially infect your display tank when you place those back in your sump where they came from. Do not move anything to a new tank that could have a living parasite on it.
Remember feed takes several days to break down to ammonia, so we are really only concerned about the fish excretions of ammonia, which is released at a consistent calculable rate.
Bacteria in a bottle products wont hurt anything and can be added since they contain limited bacteria strains.
14 days, not 30, 60, 90?
30 days is simply unnecessary,
Studying the life cycle of the problematic parasites, and factoring the Tank Transfer and freshwater dip resets, most of the parasites are completely eliminated in 10 days or less. The extra 4 is just for more confidence. The tank transfer every 4 days is vitally important for several reasons, not just ammonia.
With the tank transfer, we just need to look at the time the parasite stays on the fish, and how long it stays off the fish. The 4 days breaks the cycle, and copper assures all else are unable to continue. Each type of parasite is different, velvet is fast, and Ich is slow. The Tank Transfer by itself does not work well for the fast types, but complete elimination occurs quickly when we remove all of the parasites attempting breeding on the bottom of the tank and let the copper do its thing.
I want to do more than 1 fish at a time!
This process can be scaled, by either adding more fish to the tank (not recommended) or by having additional tanks, you just need 1 tank per fish plus 1. Stagger the tank transfer days.
Hyposalinity
Hypo is method in of itself, and there is significant demand to try to combine hypo with other medications because it must be more better! If you want to run Hypo, run hypo as your method, but do not combine copper and hypo. When the salinity is reduced, so are the compounds in the water, giving the copper less to react with, and forcing the copper to react with the fish’s gills at a higher rate. Unless you go significantly hypo, it has almost no effect on the bad parasites, but does make it significantly more stressful or even deadly on the fish.
Other diseases?
This method treats parasites; Ich, Velvet, Uronema and flukes.
It may not eliminate Uronema and does not work for bacterial infections, so if you can identify a parasite, treat directly for that parasite after this procedure.
Quarantine vs observation
Websters is not a fan of aquarists, as we are not using the term quarantine for what is actually means. To saltwater aquarists, quarantine means to isolate and eliminate pests from incoming stock. If you place the fish in clean water isolating it from the display tank for two weeks, Webster will be proud to say you quarantined, but you did not.
Observation after this process is not necessary, as the devastating or quickly to infect parasites are pretty much guaranteed to be eliminated.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to kill a fish in quarantine, but please don’t blame quarantine in general, problem solve and improve. Quarantine saves fish’s lives, and maybe more, your tanks success rate. I hope this process will keep happy fish for years to come.
Please post about anything you disagree with or would like to add. I just thought it might be beneficial to share my solutions to all the information I have sorted through.
Additional information
https://www.marinecollectors.com/pages/new-our-methods-quarantine-protocols
https://www.mantasystems.net/a/blog/post/ChloroquinePhosphate
How to Quarantine
How to Setup a Quarantine Tank The following are the bare essentials: Aquarium (10-30 gallons seems to work for most people. Bigger QT lets you house more fish and gives you more wiggle room when it comes to ammonia. Smaller QT is cheaper, easier to maintain and can be setup/broke down...
www.reef2reef.com
https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/12-4-7-quinine/
Flukes – General Guidelines
Many thanks to "Newsmyrna80" for writing this. Reposted with her permission. Some facts: Flukes are not true flukes. They are actually parasitic flatworms belonging to the class of Monogeans. There are 13 families of flukes. However, only three families infect saltwater fish. 1...
www.reef2reef.com
Last edited:
