- Joined
- Oct 29, 2019
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Where do the huge numbers of infectious agents come from? Sure, if you drop a 3" fish at the height of infectiousness in a 10 gallon with a bunch of other fish also stressed from transport and a new environment, they'll all get sick. But a fish with a mild case of the sniffles in a 200 is less likely to infect the healthy fish already in that tank and may never develop full-blown disease, no?I think you misunderstand the term epizootic. Propagule pressure in closed systems means there is a limit to what innate disease resistance will help. At a tipping point, the mere presence of huge numbers of infective agents overwhelm any resistance.
Both scenarios seem possible, but I doubt we have ways to measure just how many infectious agents a fish brings to the tank or how to predict if they'll be able to reach that critical mass. Us QT-hesitant folks have simply notice the later scenario better fits our personal experiences. Perhaps it's the more common scenario.
Calculator? So the "evidence" is a model rather than an experiment? I do get how a butterfly can cause a hurricane in theory, but I'd be willing to bet it's never happened. Initialisation conditions matter, there are a lot of them, and we probably can't measure most of them. That's why models fail.Barrett Christie has a calculator that shows how a single Neobenedenia egg can cause a virulent infection.
A trained ichthyologist at a public aquarium working full time and with more resources and equipment likely does QT quite effectively. But many of us in the hobby who set up a second tank for QT get different results. I'm not saying QT is bad, just that it may not be effective at the scale and experience level of us novice hobbyists. I'm not sure what we're doing wrong, but know it's something based on (lack of) results.Well, I just want to make one final point - this isn’t just my opinion. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums mandates that new fish acquisitions be quarantined. This is a condition of accreditation. If every major public aquarium in North America does this, is it wise to dismiss the process out of hand?
Jay
And no, I don't buy the "everyone's doing it so it must be good" argument.