YES you do need CURED liverock in there to filter water and avoid ammonia especialy in a small tank as a 10 gallons. I currently have a blue hippo tang, a kole tang and a damsel in a 21 gallons in quarantine in hyposalinity treatment. They had ick when I got them so I am treating them to get rid of ick with hypo. I have absolutely no trace of ammonia although I feed them a lot twice per day.
Without the liverock I would have tons of ammonia and fish death.
No need to treat with medication unless you get marine velvet and then you can remove the liverock and treat with copper if you ever get that but it's still kind of rare. The most common, very common, is ick and that,s easily treated with hypo and does not destroy your bio filter.
That way it's really trouble free to do quarantine.
The only drawback is if you get marine velvet you must remove the liverock and raise the salinity slowly 0.03 per day and then add Seachem Cupramine.
While you have liverock in there, use some small filter with floss and that will build up a bacteria colony in case you have to remove the liverock to treat. I always use my liverock when doing quarantine and that always gave me instant cycle. I use Totoka liverock because it is a very porous and efficiant filter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheNewGuy
I am coming up to the point where I'm about to make my first fish purchase. have decided to set up a quarantine tank with an empty 10 gal that I have with a heater, powerhead, and hob filter. I will use water from the main tank to fill the qt and let the filter sit in the main tank for a while to establish more bacteria for the qt tank. my question is, am I going to need live rock in there as well? I have no sump that I can take rock from and replace later, and i would prefer not to take rock from the main tank each time i set up a qt tank. The same goes for sand as well. Will i be ok without rock or sand in a qt tank?
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