I notice that everyone mentions quarantining fish, but if you are not quarantining your coral frags and LR in a separate fallow (fishless) tank for 6-8 weeks, you also run the risk of infecting your display. It only takes a drop of water to infect your display. Every addition you make resets that 6-8 week counter. You basically have to have the patience of a saint.

fishless is fishless without fish present the ich cannot survive....its only a matter of time and yes if you add any new additions including liverock or corals you can have a slight chance of transfering ich from another set up but the chances are alot smaller then with fish themselves......so after the fish come out no new additions untill the ich has died off of anykind.


without fish the ich will not survive....adding things while fighting ich is not a very smart idea anyways.....

I definitely fell under the qt is nonsense camp... Its not about cost with me, its maintenance. This all changed a week ago when I got velvet and lost 10 out of 13 fish in less than a week.... Yes the system was present with ich from the get go but water had always been stable and the fish never broke out.

All it took was one mysterious night where somehow some type of poison entered my tank... still have not found the cause (new powerheads, possible excessive chlorine in city water, airborne TILEX fumes from 3 rooms away) The next week all fish are dead from velvet. The stress from the unknown poison allowed it to take over and consume the tank.

Needless to say, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when your inhabitants get stressed at some point and all the crap that you never knew was surviving in there takes over and wipes out your tank... $700 down the toilet in a week and not being able to have a fish in my tank for 2 fn months. I may be bitter but I am quarantining from this day on.

Karma caught up to me as I was against QT tanks on the first page of this thread LOL.

I got Marine Velvet just a week ago when I plopped a juv. Koran Angel in. Looked fine in the store, ate in my tank, but a few days after getting him in my tank I saw skin starting to peel around his pectoral fin. I thought maybe it was attacked but then ALL of my tangs developed 1-4 spots. Next day, I found the Koran breathing heavy with another patch of peeled skin further down it's body. Of course it died later that night.

Turned on the ozone (6-8 hours/day) and got a UV sterilizer (24/7), and there were no spots on any fish within 2 days.

So as an amendment to my first post is that you need to spend the money on some equipment to prevent Ich and Velvet. A QT is an option and another is Ozone/UV IMO.
I stand by my initial statement that a strong diet and nutrition are key, and I believe that it helped my fish recover quickly.

My quarantine didn't work out so well recently. I quarantined a flame angel and coral beauty a few weeks ago. The flame angel must have bumped into something and got a scratch on its side. This could have happened in the main tank just as easily in the quarantine though. The scratch got infected, the fish quit eating and it passed away.

The Coral Beauty was doing perfectly fine, eating a lot and swimming around. A week after the flame passed away, I came in one morning to find it stuck in the middle of my PVC pipe. Apparently it tried to turn around and couldn't quite make it.

I still endorse quarantine tanks, but this was very frustrating. I lost a wrasse previously in my quarantine tank when it's head got stuck in a smaller pvc opening.

I have my 3 fish in 1.009 for a month and half now and they are in great shape, eat like little pigs and are ready for the ride back to normal salinity wich will take a good week. I don't think that 1.009 can hurt the fish, or mine would not feel so good after so long.

I have a blue tang, a kole tang and a blue damsel in there in a 21 gallons. Should be a stressfull situation but they behave great and look great.

Thanks to the porous liverock the water quality is also great. I think keeping good water quality is the key and the liverock create a hiding place and the fish feel much better if they have their little quiet place to hide.