do i have to quarantine fish?

[Ro Bow]

do i have to quarantine saltwater fish? I am going to have a 125 gallon aquarium, is it absoluutely necessesary to quarantine the fish? I will buy all the fish from Live aquaria

 

[WIReefer]

It really depends on if your comfortable enough to risk it. Fish can get stressed from shipping and have issues.

 

[Ro Bow]

would the fish get sick? If so would the fish die from the sickness?

 

[sp1187]

no, it's not necessary.
I don't. but I only buy local where they are treated in copper and dated to when they came in.
I usually wait awhile to buy.

 

[Ro Bow]

i dont have any good saltwater local stores besides petco which only has a limited amount of saltwater fish. Thats why im buying online. Live aquaria says the fish arrived healthy, is that true? I dont want them to die...

 

[NashobaTek]

I don't qt either and I've gotten all of my fish from saltwater fish. They all have a arrive alive guarantee usually. Except for the expert only fish.
It is up to you if you're willing to risk introducing any disease, Once you have multiple expensive fish.

 

[tehmadreefer]

Absolutely not. QT is a bunch of.....

 

[Azedenkae]

do i have to quarantine saltwater fish? I am going to have a 125 gallon aquarium, is it absoluutely necessesary to quarantine the fish? I will buy all the fish from Live aquaria

You don't have to quarantine, but you risk bring disease into the display and if it is a disease that can persist for a long time, you either have to go fallow, redo everything, or risk it infecting more fish added.

would the fish get sick? If so would the fish die from the sickness?

The shipping stress can make fish unhealthy for a few days, but generally not 'sick' per se. It can however cause the fish to be susceptible to diseases it already may have to fight off and then yeah, become sick.

i dont have any good saltwater local stores besides petco which only has a limited amount of saltwater fish. Thats why im buying online. Live aquaria says the fish arrived healthy, is that true? I dont want them to die...

If you buy from LiveAquaria, then I'd recommend quarantining. For me, LiveAquaria had been hit or miss. They have some very healthy specimens, but some very weak specimens. Around half the live stock I order from LiveAquaria was one or the other. So yes, I would recommend quarantining. I would never add any livestock from LiveAquaria directly to my display (anymore).

 

[Ajayabb]

Maybe look at an online vendor that quarantines and pretreats all their fish like TSM Aquatics

 

[ExoS]

I am a newbie so I won’t comment directly. All I know from my research is that you will see example after example in quarantine threads where the person says they never quarantined until they had velvet or ich wipe out an entire tank.

I don’t have a feel for the odds and plenty seem to get away with no quarantine and only occasional issues. I will say the shear volume of sad stories convinced me it was worth it.

If you don’t want to quarantine at home, the humblefish forum has a decent size list of vendors and they only allow ones that offer quarantined fish for sale. Dr Reef seems to be the most popular.

 

[mike550]

Everyone has an opinion as to whether or not to quarantine, and also what quarantine means to you. For fish, most all of the time I’ll quarantine for observation for two weeks. If they don’t get sick, etc then I’ll move them to my DT. If they get sick then I work from there. Others will just do a five minute freshwater dip and then into the tank. Some do a full on quarantine like Humble Fish. My point is learn the risks to each approach and decide what you want to do.

Buying from LiveAquaria is another debate on its own.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Do you have to - NO
DO I - rarely
Should you- Probably

Why ?
Quarantining a fish allows the fish to de-stress and for you to have the fish adjust to your parameters, your food while providing it a safe place for it to thrive away from more aggressive and established tank mates who can out compete it for food. Putting a fish directly into your display puts the fish into more stress after being netted at store or from shipment and added stress events leads to the reason why we quarantine our fish.
A fish’s immune system should be able to fight off more infections and diseases, however the shock of transportation compromises your fish’s immune system leaving it vulnerable to any disease that gets shipped with it. Some of these diseases when they break out can be so deadly, they can wipe our your tank within days. So what are these deadly diseases? Well, I will tell you right now it’s not ich. Ich is child’s play compared to these three below and they are becoming more and more common in the fish supply chain:
- Brooklynella (Brook)
- Marine Velvet
- Uronema

Best of all is that quarantining is cheap and easy to set up . there are many methods of quarantinINg such as :
Copper
Copper power
Ruby rally Pro
General Cure
Prazi
Chloroquine Phosphate
Hyposalinity
Tank transfer method

Whichever method you choose, be sure to monitor QT regularly and if copper - HAVE A GOOD COPPER TEST KIT

 

[Ro Bow]

would a salifert copper test kit be ok?

 

[zukihara]

I have not used a QT yet. If you are committed to doing it right then you will get good results, but doing it right and filling up a 125 ain't gonna happen in my opinion.

You'd have to have multiple tanks spaced apart and wait many weeks between each fish, coral and invert you add, otherwise you are not doing it right.

 

[MikeyG]

It really depends on if your comfortable enough to risk it. Fish can get stressed from shipping and have issues.

Some reefers swear by it, and others don't.
I do not quarantine.
However i d treat the fish during acclimation.
I do a 1 hour dip with Para Guard.
Put new fish in refugium fir 30 to 60 min.
Then do a 1 hour dip with Maracyn 2.
This way i attack both parasites and bacteria before introducing them in my display.
What i have noticed is that this method gets the fish to start eating within a day or 2 at most.

 

[Kynzo]

You don't have to and you can just get lucky like many others have with just adding them directly to you tank. But you have to think, every time you add one without quarantining, you run the risk of that next fish you add being the one that comes in sick and wiping out your system.

 

[Ghost25]

I don't quarantine, but I also have a small tank so I don't have thousands of dollars worth of fish. However, I also buy all my fish in person where I can inspect them carefully and look at the health of all the other fish in the system. I have often seen a fish I want that looks healthy but another fish in the same tank is clearly sick with an infectious disease. Buying fish sight unseen is a big gamble in my opinion.

 

[iMi]

Just my two cents. The pre-quarantined fish you see on offer are a bunch of malarkey. If you didn’t quarantine it, it hasn’t been quarantined. You don’t have to quarantine if you don’t mind the risk. It’s really up to you and what you are comfortable doing.

 

[mehaffydr]

I was one who would not quarantine and thought it totally unnecessary. Until I purchased a Naso tang that had Velvet and wiped out a good number of fish before I could get the remaining living fish in QT with Copper. Velvet kills within just a day or two after you see symptoms. I will now Quarantine everything that I buy now matter where it comes from. I just finished an 1100 gallon tank and over time it will have thousands of dollars in livestock. Also I just don't like killing fish regardless of the cost. Setting up and maintaining a Quarantine tank is very simple.

 

[vetteguy53081]

would a salifert copper test kit be ok?

Yes, just no API kit