Quarantine Tank Help

[daniella3d]

This stuff seem to kill more fish than it save. Did it ever work for someone? I keep hearing horror stories about Herbatana.

You should use Paraguard in quarantine, and after that, Prazipro. That's what I did with my copperband and it worked very well.

For the QT, I use liverock and I kept a Magnum HOT running with a micron filter. Never had a problem with water quality. Never lost a fish in QT.

Don't use Herbatana, use Paraguard as recommanded first as a dip when you get the fish, do a one hour dip at the dip concentration, then use paraguard at normal concentration for a few weeks, then do prazipro. All these are quite gentle on the fish and control parasites quite well.

Originally Posted by mikeclarke

Hi there,

All I dosed was herbtana and artimiss as everyone looked good until they were at the bottom. I took the CBB and acclimated to the big tank and he has been thriving. He eats all the mysis and cyclops eeze that I give him.

So I'd like to get a tang for the 6' 100 gallon but I don't want to waste my money. How do I keep a QT tank looking nice but keeping the water quality high?

[asylumdown]

+1 on this sounding like an ammonia problem. Based on your description, it sounds as though this tank has had no livestock in it in 6+ months, has very little (none?) filtration, and the only input of organic material is whatever has been in your display tank water. Does this tank have a canister or HOB filter? Since your display tank is cycled, there won't be nearly enough ammonia in the water you're adding to your QT to keep a bacterial bed large enough to process the waste of three medium sized fish. In the 15 gallon tanks I use for the tank transfer method (which are filterless), 3 fish is enough to bring the ammonia levels to measurably dangerous levels in 48 hours. I have to keep that under control with rigorous testing and liberal use of Prime.

If you want to keep a QT tank ready to add fish at a moment's notice with little daily work required on your part, you need to keep it's cycle going while it's fishless. That means either tossing in a cocktail shrimp every so often, or dosing ammonia directly. Even then, you'll need to test for ammonia daily when you add fish, as the bacterial population will only grow to the size of it's food source, so there's a good chance adding fish will cause a mini-cycle no matter what you do.

Were you testing for ammonia? Did you test for ammonia when the fish died? Ammonia suppresses pH, so I'm not surprised your pH was low. In fact your low pH was likely why the fish lived as long as they did, and why one survived, as low pH keeps most of the free ammonia in it's non-toxic NH4 state. At normal reef pH, almost all free ammonia in the water would be in the super deadly NH3 state.

For a QT tank it's a good idea to have a quick and dirty API test for ammonia sitting right next to it, and the biggest bottle of prime you can buy on stand-by.

Also +1 on Prazipro. Best investment you can make I think.