Q for everyone are you FOR or AGAINST QT

[N.Sreefer]

Actually ;Pompus the vaccines are mRNA.

Great movie on this ... 12 Monkeys. I didn't know it but the best vaccines are made from the original virus. In the movie the quest was to try and find a sample of the original, so they could make a "real" vaccine.

I was thinking about the IPV vaccine but good point most of them aren't even inactive viruses anymore. That would be a wicked job go to a tropical rainforest and explore while getting paid for it. Sounds like a good doc I'll have to give er a watch.

N.Sreefer, Yes, I have been putting up with this since we were doing it on Paper magazines. Virtually all those people are out of the hobby now but they constantly pop up and in the beginning of their "debate" it is kind of fun sparring with them. I realize it is hard to grasp the concept of immune fish but then, I have a 50 year old tank to prove it.

None of them of course will have an old tank because so far, there are none and I don't think it could happen very often if at all. I truly believe fish need exposure to parasites at least occasionally or the tank is doomed eventually. The longer fish live with no immunity, the more likely something will get in and kill everything .

A few weeks ago one of my closest, life long friends died of cancer. He had to have his immune system totally eradicated to try to eliminate the cancer. For a year he lived like that. He couldn't go out or be near anyone because the slightest thing would kill him. He was in constant pain and spent the last 3 months suffering in the hospital because the pain was to severe for him to come home.

I want my fish to live a long, normal life and that includes being fully immune to everything.
Of course a new tank won't work like that and a different set of rules apply.

I always said that a Noob should not use my method at first but can and should use parts of it. The food part.



Remember this "method" is not new. When this hobby started this was the only method. I was there. When someone invented the internet, new methods emerged that should be scrutinized.

If a fish dies of anything besides old age, you are doing it wrong.

Sorry for your loss its really hard when they go that way. My mother passed from liver failure and she was in a similar state before passing so I can relate to how hard that is. I would not want my fish spending their whole lives essentially immunocomprimised and worry constantly about letting anything in.

 

[Goaway]

@ying yang and @Paul B. Ying yang did an astounding amount of research on the copper banded butterfly fish. Paul B made an article on how to pick one that is very healthy for higher survivability in captivity.
This of course caused me to want a cbb. Which i have had short term. Just a few months. Currently my biggest eater. Both of these 2 people have helped in q and a about getting the cbb to eat. And ying yang is under 1 year of reef keeping. Fantastic journey it was.. I have met wonderful people on these forums who offer a wide range of information.

I'm no fish expert. I do believe some fish should be given special treatment. Angelfish, anthias, chromis and damsil. Uronema is horrifying. Qt should be in use and fish like those should probably be medicated against uronema. Again, not an expert. I've never ran into it and dont want too.

If you like to quarantine, go for it. Dont fix what isn't broken.
If you are new to fish keeping, get you dt and qt cycling. New systems are stressful on fish.

I don't quarantine anymore. Temp acclimate and release. To quarantine or not, even a noob can get a qt set up wrong.

 

[flourishofmediocrity]

N.Sreefer, Yes, I have been putting up with this since we were doing it on Paper magazines.

What you are proposing with your "method" sounds alarming to most people the first time, you must realize that. And what's even worse is the only real evidence you seem have is your own tank. If that's not the case, please let me know, how many tanks have you tested on? If we're being honest, the only way we could know that your "method" is safer than QT for the fish is if we knew how exactly many "old" tanks have a crash due to an parasite outbreak but we don't, and we never will. Throughout this entire discussion I have disclaimed and quantified all of my statements so as to not give the wrong impression or say something I don't know for sure without letting you know it is out of my knowledge. You don't talk like that, you talk as if everything you are saying is proven fact when you have no way of knowing it, and that's why you have to "put up" with questions like these. I don't expect a complete scientific study done in a class 5 lab, but if someone actually did some testing with multiple tanks and was carefully documented, I wouldn't be so skeptical, and I might actually buy your book.

 

[TerraFerma]

What you are proposing with your "method" sounds alarming to most people the first time, you must realize that. And what's even worse is the only real evidence you seem have is your own tank. If that's not the case, please let me know, how many tanks have you tested on? If we're being honest, the only way we could know that your "method" is safer than QT for the fish is if we knew how exactly many "old" tanks have a crash due to an parasite outbreak but we don't, and we never will. Throughout this entire discussion I have disclaimed and quantified all of my statements so as to not give the wrong impression or say something I don't know for sure without letting you know it is out of my knowledge. You don't talk like that, you talk as if everything you are saying is proven fact when you have no way of knowing it, and that's why you have to "put up" with questions like these. I don't expect a complete scientific study done in a class 5 lab, but if someone actually did some testing with multiple tanks and was carefully documented, I wouldn't be so skeptical, and I might actually buy your book.

Paul made it pretty clear a few posts back that his method is not for new hobby entrants or folks unfamiliar with the way things were done a while back (the later of which his method is conceptually based). That said anyone can improve fish husbandry skills by incorporating some of his methods. You just can't go dumping fish straight into your average tank. I think Paul has been running the same LR for 30 plus years...

 

[gbroadbridge]

How long have you had a marine aquarium?
Did you have a protocol for fish introduction before?
How many fish had you kept before you started QT? How many survived?

How big was your display? How long had you had it up? Did other fish contract anything? Did other fish survive?

What is the size of your DT? What is your protocol for maintaining it? Do you always keep it up? Do you use it for medication or observation?

If you use medication how do you handle the QT for your inverts?

Thank you in advance for your responses.

Wow, a whole bunch of questions. I'm flattered

I've been keeping reef tanks for about 5 years, but this particular tank is only 8 months old And was started without the benefit of any live rock.

I have always purchased from a reputable lfs and have never had an issue in the past, which is why i was shocked when this happened.

The DT is 90g including sump, and has water changes every week of 10%

2 fish died, a royal gramma and a regal tang.

The QT IS 40g, for inverts I plan to dump and flush, but that is going to be very unusual as I already have tons of CUC

Have fun collecting stats

 

[gbroadbridge]

Gbroadbrdge. Thanks for buying my book. I don't make anything from those as 100% of the profits go to MS research in my wife's name.

In the beginning of the book someplace, it says that the book isn't for Noobs.
My tank wasn't always 50 years old and it ran for most years with ASW.

I made more mistakes then than anyone here and killed more fish than Starkist Tuna. Making mistakes is how you learn and in those days there was no internet, computers, cell phones or credit cards so everything was expensive and hard to get.

I learned by trial and error and SCUBA diving with my own equipment and boat.

I didn't come about my methods overnight or by reading here. It was tough and I tried enough medications to open up my own pharmacy as there were no salt water medications so I made my own from Human chemicals.

I killed and cured a lot of fish. But eventually I learned the secret. That was maybe in the 80s when I started to know how to keep fish without medications and quarantine. I found out how to allow them to spawn and realized that if they are spawning, they are as healthy as they are in the sea. No fish can be healthier.

I gradually learned about their immune system and then many years later I can read about it now in scientific journals.

No one studied "ornamental" fish then and farmed fish were not really a thing.

Now we know all about that but unfortunately this hobby for the most part is still stuck in the 70s with as much disease and dead fish as we had then. Most of us can't grasp how easy it is to get fish to take care of themselves like they have been doing since before Nancy Pelosi was born.

If your fish are getting sick, or if they will get sick if they are exposed to a pathogen, they are not very healthy because a fully functioning fish is immune to just about everything.. If that were not true, my tank would not exist.

By the way, I love Sydney and went there on R&R in 1971.

I understand what you're saying, and I agree.

I guess the point I am making is that I honestly believe a lot of the problems these days are due to the lack of available affordable live rock.

Bottled spores on dead rock don't really count.

That is why I think things have deteriorated so fast in this hobby. When I set up my first reef tank about 5 years ago (yes I suppose I'm a noob even though I have kept freshwater tanks for more than 30 years), it was with live rock and watching every new hitchhiker we found kept my son interested for hours. Now my son is 18 and nothing interests him for hours, not even kinky websites.

That tank had zero problems ever even though keeping it was new to me.

My new tank, only 8 months old was fine until bam, one new fish killed a regal tang with ich followed by flukes. Yes I did disect the fish once it croaked.

The whole problem is everything is too clean, sterilsed to death if you like. There is no answer until you start bottling your tank gravel and water.

Keep safe, and if you are in Sydney again, feel welcome to pop in for dinner.


Regards
Graham.

 

[Paul B]

if we knew how exactly many "old" tanks have a crash due to an parasite outbreak but we don't, and we never will.

I know of I think 4 old tanks on here that don't quarantine and have no problems. I have heard of hundreds of tanks that crashed using any method. I know Atoll, Lasse, Sub sea and a couple of others have healthy, old tanks that I don't think quarantine but I don't know anyone personally.

I only know one person with a salt tank who lives about 10 miles from me. He used to manage a LFS and I got many fish from him. He never quarantines and has an old, healthy system.

Almost all tanks that crash or have disease problems are Noob tanks. Noobs don't know yet what to do and as I keep saying, a Noob tank will not be healthy unless you can fill it with real live rock. I personally would not start a tank unless I could get live rock. The problems with dry rock could be unsurmountable. It is what it is.

Obviously old tanks don't crash or they wouldn't be old. Eventually people learn how to keep a tank without any disease problems and it isn't from medicating or quarantining which is why none of those tanks exist. I have been asking for one since the 80s.

The whole problem is everything is too clean, sterilsed to death if you like. There is no answer until you start bottling your tank gravel and water.

Yes, we used to use dead coral skeletons for rock and remove them every week to bleach them.
No tanks were healthy and we had to keep pennies in the water to constantly add copper.

Tanks are so easy now compared to then but what really made it hard was the internet.
We learned everything by trial and error, now we learn rumor, conjecture, medications and luck.

That system has been around for half a century and causes more problems than it helps but keeps fish medication companies in business.

I used to use copper and everything else, but had many problems. More than anyone here. But learning by trial and error can't fail. It is your mistakes and you can't blame anyone else for your mistakes.

For some reason half of my old pictures are gone from my photo hosting service. I have pictures of the old, dead white corals we used to bleach.

This one shows the rock we used. It is dead corals as that is all we had. This blue devil, one of the first fish available is over his nest of eggs. Circa 1973 or so.

That was a "reef" tank then.

 

[gbroadbridge]

"Tanks are so easy now compared to then but what really made it hard was the internet.We learned everything by trial and error, now we learn rumor, conjecture, medications and luck."

Yes, all you need these days are a barrel of bucks .

And everyone thinks that cycling a tank and getting immeasurable ammonia is rocket science due to having the attention span of a house fly.

We're on the same page.

 

[Squidward]

Yes I do TTM and have never seen ich again. 300g with 12 Tangs ich free. What a feeling, what a sight. No worries.

 

[ying yang]

@ying yang and @Paul B. Ying yang did an astounding amount of research on the copper banded butterfly fish. Paul B made an article on how to pick one that is very healthy for higher survivability in captivity.
This of course caused me to want a cbb. Which i have had short term. Just a few months. Currently my biggest eater. Both of these 2 people have helped in q and a about getting the cbb to eat. And ying yang is under 1 year of reef keeping. Fantastic journey it was.. I have met wonderful people on these forums who offer a wide range of information.

I'm no fish expert. I do believe some fish should be given special treatment. Angelfish, anthias, chromis and damsil. Uronema is horrifying. Qt should be in use and fish like those should probably be medicated against uronema. Again, not an expert. I've never ran into it and dont want too.

If you like to quarantine, go for it. Dont fix what isn't broken.
If you are new to fish keeping, get you dt and qt cycling. New systems are stressful on fish.

I don't quarantine anymore. Temp acclimate and release. To quarantine or not, even a noob can get a qt set up wrong.

Hi mibu.
And glad it helped,the way I see this forum for me is we all learn from each other and then pass the information to others either directly or indirectly as some of the information I've learnt is from old r2r members who no longer use this site,so if we all keep researching and share our experiences of what works and what
Doesn't work for ourselves then others can then have better knowledge and then decide which route to take on whatever they wanting to achieve

Glad your cbb still healthy and eating,mine also biggest eater in my tank ( absolute pig ha ha ( I feed tank 3- 4 times . daily because of him
So if we all continue to share our experiences and keep helping each other this site will remain a very friendly/helpful place for others now and in the future, and there's lots of ways to get to end result which I believe we all want which is healthy inhabitants in our tanks and long lived
,I started with dry rock/dry sand ( wish I didnt) but amount of pods,worms and all the other micro fauna is astounding and love watching tank after lights out ^_^ and cant wait for my tank to mature more and get this healthy micro-biome I see mentioned all the time as if it will benefit my tank then thats great and look forward to it. Anyway hope everyone gets great enjoyment from their tanks

 

[HuduVudu]

Yes I do TTM and have never seen ich again. 300g with 12 Tangs ich free. What a feeling, what a sight. No worries.

How long have you been doing TTM?
How long have you been keeping aquariums?
What size of tanks do you use for TTM?
Do you medicate at all?

Thanks in advance for your response.

 

[Susan Edwards]

I'm in between. I don't like sterile QT tanks, too stressful imo, nor do I like doing automatic meds like copper with no reason. Also too stressful. And if you don't QT your corals and inverts, you are not keeping parasites out of your display so a full QT process is a waste. I've lost more corals in trying to do a QT so I don't. Just dip in 3 different dips.

I've always set up more of an observation tank to see if fish eating and get them a bit fatter, and yeah, have lost fish doing that. Mostly fish shipped. I currently have what I call an observation tank. A 40g RS E170 AIO. It is home to 2 clowns who cannot go into my main display. 1 clown had been in the MD but got chased into the overflow so his home is the 40g with a companion. I have some sand and live rock in the tank. No corals, so to get a fish out, I can remove the rocks.

Depending on the fish, and where I buy it, will determine if I put it/them in this tank first. I do have medication to add to food and polylab's medic which can be added to either tank if needed and rally. I also have a UV sterilizer for the new tank and can drop the flow rate if I see ick.

For my new upgraded tank (from 125 to 225), I added a diamond goby, 2 engineer goby (I think) and a small blue tang (dory) and a sleeper head goby. Only the sleeper head died, but it wasn't eating. 1 engineer goby disappeared. Could still be in there. Who knows. Everyone else is healthy and my other fish, (since 2018 & 1 from 2017) are healthy.

My first tank in 2017 I lost 9 out of 13 fish to velvet. Made a typical noobie mistake of adding too many to a 60 gal tank at once. 1 fish I have survived and I still have. Other fish I lost in 2018 were from a paint primer used to cover smoke damaged walls (My mother used out master bedroom and smoked in that room). That noxious stuff wiped out a lot of fish and corals in 2 tanks.

Future plans (after holidays) is to make a batch of food including clams and mussel (prob. frozen as I'm not shelling-yuck) if I can find raw. Or get hubby to shell fresh and then freeze. I also had vitachem and selcon to the fish food and feed mostly frozen. And will try to get some more black worms and maybe learn to cultivate white worms (will check @Paul B 's book (which I have)

 

[Squidward]

How long have you been doing TTM?
How long have you been keeping aquariums?
What size of tanks do you use for TTM?
Do you medicate at all?

Thanks in advance for your response.

I started doing TTM in 2019.
Kept aquariums since I was 18 from basic freshwater to cichlids and now saltwater. I'm now 44.
I mainly use 10g tanks and a 15g rubbermaid container.
I use prazi pro for certain fish like angels.

 

[Paul B]

Just some interesting information (Thanks Lasse)

In 1885, Louis Pasteur hypothesized that animals raised in sterile conditions would not be able to survive (Pasteur, 1885). Bernard S. Wostmann and his team proved Pasteur’s hypothesis wrong when they developed methods for breeding animals in germ-free conditions (Wostmann, 1981). However, they discovered that germ-free animals required large quantities of nutrient-rich food, yet continued to have stunted growth and development compared with normal animals. Germ-free animals had smaller hearts, lungs, and livers, lower cardiac output, thinner intestinal walls, reduced gastrointestinal motility, lower serum gamma globulin levels, and atrophied lymph nodes (Wostmann, 1981). Most of these deficiencies can be restored by introducing intestinal microbiota from animals raised under normal conditions. Therefore, while microbial colonization may not be essential for life, it is critical for health (Guarner and Malagelada, 2003; O’Hara and Shanahan, 2006).

 

[Money pit reefer]

I think it's a good idea and I had a complete Qt system in place when I started. I did everything humblefish suggested and I lost every fish that I tried to Qt. I've not done it since and I've not had a problem but my LFS does limited Qt.

 

[HuduVudu]

Wow thank you for the responses.

A few more questions if you don't mind.

I started doing TTM in 2019.

How many fish have you processed through during this time?
Did you have any losses?

Kept aquariums since I was 18 from basic freshwater to cichlids and now saltwater. I'm now 44.

Do you still have fresh water aquariums?
When did you start your first salt water aquarium? When you started to do salt water have you done it continously?

Have you always quarantined? If not was there some event that caused you to start?

Thanks for answering. I am trying to pin down what people do for quarantine and how they do it. I think there is a lot of information lost and it would be helpful for other people to see what people are doing with QT.

 

[lefkonj]

I only buy captive bred or QT'ed fish. There is a local store that QT's fish for you, you can only buy them once they have gone through the process. I know of another local store that is about to start the same thing.

I had mixed luck with QT myself but won't add anything that hasn't been through it by someone more knowledgeable than myself

 

[HuduVudu]

I think it's a good idea ... I've not done it since

You think it is a good idea but now you don't do it?
Can you expound more on why you think that?

I've not done it since and I've not had a problem but my LFS does limited Qt.

How long have you been in the hobby?
How long have you been doing salt water aquariums?
How old is your current tank?
What size is your current tank?
How many fish do you have?
Do you know what type of protocol that your LFS follows (if you can)?

Thanks in advance for the responses, I really appreciate it.

 

[HuduVudu]

but won't add anything that hasn't been through it

Do you also insist on your corals and invertabrates being QTed? Or do you only do fish only?

Thanks so much in advance for your response.

 

[costaricareef]

Just some interesting information (Thanks Lasse)

In 1885, Louis Pasteur hypothesized that animals raised in sterile conditions would not be able to survive (Pasteur, 1885). Bernard S. Wostmann and his team proved Pasteur’s hypothesis wrong when they developed methods for breeding animals in germ-free conditions (Wostmann, 1981). However, they discovered that germ-free animals required large quantities of nutrient-rich food, yet continued to have stunted growth and development compared with normal animals. Germ-free animals had smaller hearts, lungs, and livers, lower cardiac output, thinner intestinal walls, reduced gastrointestinal motility, lower serum gamma globulin levels, and atrophied lymph nodes (Wostmann, 1981). Most of these deficiencies can be restored by introducing intestinal microbiota from animals raised under normal conditions. Therefore, while microbial colonization may not be essential for life, it is critical for health (Guarner and Malagelada, 2003; O’Hara and Shanahan, 2006).

What is your point with this? I mean, putting fish throuigh QT for 6-8 weeks and then putting them into my DT full of live rock and millions of other organisms is hardly sterile. There is a big difference between the biome needed to survive and develop and the biome comprised of (potentially) lethal pathogens. Sometimes they cross of course (i.e. we have some potentially dangerous bacteria in our bodies), depending on immune system response, but if I know that there is a very dangerous bacteria that may kill me, If I can, I will not be for exposing anyone to it. Same with fish. We are talking about trying (not 100%) to eliminate I would guess 5-10 dangerous pathogens and their respective strains. This will have no influence on how a fish later develops in a full reef tank (especially yours I would suspect) with a very full and complete biome (but hopefully not lethal). I would say again: it's a matter of maximizing the probability of success with fish for those of us without that 50 year tank special sauce to help us out. I agree 100% with the nutrition recommendations, and for sure it makes a difference. Cheers,