Fallow period
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vetteguy53081
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Recommended: 45-60 days in which I refer the full 60 days
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I vote "60" days if you really want to sleep well. (Other people can live with shorter times-- raising the tank temp, etc. But I had one tank that had to go fallow 3 times... likely due to 'user error'... mine.)
I personally had this happen (though I think it was velvet). I left it 4 months, while I re-thought what I wanted to do with regards to preventing the problem going forward, as well as making sure parameters were in line. I would think the 60-76 day period is what most people would say. After the 'disaster' - I wasn't feeling any rush to restock.
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That's a tough one. The fallow period for Cryptocaryon, marine Ich is very commonly listed as "76 days", but that is actually an erroneous extrapolation from older literature. Certainly, longer works just as well as the minimum time, but 60 days is fine. It can be as short as 45 days at 81 F. or higher temperatures.
The issue comes in here if you don't know the disease. The fallow period for flukes is 30 to 35 days with no fish host, and for velvet, it's reported to be as short as 24 days, but I use the ich time frame for velvet as well. The issue is really with rare oddball diseases - viruses, internal protozoans and non-obligate parasites. Nobody really knows the time frame for those.....
The biggest issue with "fallow periods" is when new fish are added back into the tank that have not been given a comprehensive quarantine - they can bring a new disease into the tank, making the fallow period *seem* to fail....
reefer10
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So it goes like this. I got a lawnmower blenny, rarely saw him nipping at hair algae, and could not get it to eat any other food. So I think he starved, had a very pinched stomach after about a month of no eating. No spots or scratching, or even labored breathing. That fish was only in the tank no more than 5 weeks. Within a week my other fish that I had for about 3 years by themselves and only other fish in the tank, stopped eating as well. The smaller fish a couple weeks prior to that looked like it had lymphocistis, didn’t scratch or flash and ate well, also got better a couple weeks before stopping eating. That fish after not eating for about a week and a half, started breathing heavy kinda swimming a little aimlessly, and hiding a bit. The last 2 days definitely labored breathing and just kinda floating around and laying on the bottom the last day. Then a week later the same scenario that happened with the second fish happened with the other fish. This fish did not show signs of lymphoma. I only saw a very small area of whitish spots on the last fish, but did not look like ich or velvet. So I did a dose of Prazipro. The last one still died on the 4th day of Prazipro. So the last 2 fish went from healthy to what I explained in about a week and a half timeframe. So I don’t know if it was internal parasites or not. Will going fallow kill off that stuff as well?
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