The Other Way to Run a Reef Tank (no Quarantine)
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Subsea
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If you got enough cabbage to feed the goat, no worries, bring on the clowns.
PS: I think he may practice nutrient recycling by allowing the clown to graze.
Julian Sprung once said he always practed nutrient recycling by growing coral, then when nutrient export was required, he fragged and sold coral.
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Actually I thought he was gonna go for the maxima clams for sure but didn’t. Doesn’t touch the corals and I have a big variety to choose from. It seems the reason they are listed as not reef safe is because they might go after hermit, snails, shrimps etc... my hermits have become solely nocturnal feeders ever since I added the Sargassum and bluejaw triggers a couple years back they must be smart. Around 6 months back I realized I wasn’t seeing my hermits, so one night when I got up to take a leak I flashed a flashlight in there looking for wierd nocturnal animals and that’s when I say my hermits counted 15 alone I could see. The snails just get ignored by the triggers, I think they prefer the 8 to 10 various frozen Hikari cubes I feed the fish everyday.
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Paul B
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You are correct, I don't have any acropora now. Since I moved here I can't find any. But in the life of this tank I normally had a load of them. They grew like weeds from pinky size to grapefruit size. But when you have spawning clown gobies, every few days they lay eggs on them and kill an inch of it at a time. The acropora can't keep up with those little suckers. You can see her eggs here above her.
If you have a healthy tank the fish will lay eggs, (if you have pairs) and spawning fish present their own situations like fighting, cleaning a nest, moving things and biting you.
Healthy corals will also fight and exude chemicals that will try to kill other corals (a skimmer should remove these chemicals and the reason I normally run Ozone, Not, as is stated all the time for silly parasite control)
Healthy fish may also jump out as I assume they are stronger swimmers and they tend to chase fish away from their nesting site. In the sea a clownfish for example will chase away fish from a few yards away. Most tanks don't have a few yards so they constantly fight. And spawn.
If a tank is not in the best health, the fish are more lethargic and just want to eat, text and stay alive. Sort of like a lot of people I know.
They don't have much interest in anything. On my job (I was the foreman of sometimes 150 construction workers) I used to call them Doot Da doos
They used to walk around like they were busy, but they weren't doing anything, just going Doot Da Do, Doot Da Do all day.
Semi healthy fish are like that, which is why they get sick and we can enjoy disease threads.
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fishybizzness
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I have come a long way since losing everything I added to my tank last year. I now run uv, ozone, use nsw regularly and feed fresh food. My gobies have been spawning regularly and I noticed last night that my banded coral shrimp is laden with eggs! I feel like things are definitely coming around since I started using these methods and hoping for continued success!
fishybizzness
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Also, after adding a few months ago my Atlantic doctor fish showed a few spots a few days after adding it to the tank but they went away after a few days and haven't come back since.
REEFIN RIOS
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I’ve had plenty more sucesss than no QT, as well as my dad, actually he’s more successful with out a QT. Look bro all in all your not gonna change my views on Qt it failed for me, unless you wanna buy my a qt setup and buy me fish, I’ll qt it, for as long as you want. Hmm that would be pretty cool of someone buys me a QT setup. lol but yea I think the author of this article said some really good points, and wait so basicly your saying the only way to have a successful SALTWATER FISH TANK is to have no corals? Do you have any corals MR. @Frogger ? If you want a truly sterile reef, go over to a petco and buy ur self some fake corals, there you go solved ur problem, qt fish for 1 yrs to ensure they are clean, no sand , fake decorations only so you can take it out every month and clean with hot water, and what it’s like having a goldfish in a bowl ...absolutely NO FUN. People QT that’s there thing, others like me don’t and has worked for me a very long time.
My fish are like my Labs, I walk by my tank and they start going into a frenzy especially in the evening when I feed them, and the suckers get 8 to 10 cubes of frozen a day. I open my fridge and my Labs are on me like hey guy what are we gonna snack on. Fish and dogs have a lot in common, feed them well with good food and they are always healthy.
You are correct, I don't have any acropora now. Since I moved here I can't find any. But in the life of this tank I normally had a load of them. They grew like weeds from pinky size to grapefruit size. But when you have spawning clown gobies, every few days they lay eggs on them and kill an inch of it at a time. The acropora can't keep up with those little suckers. You can see her eggs here above her.
If you have a healthy tank the fish will lay eggs, (if you have pairs) and spawning fish present their own situations like fighting, cleaning a nest, moving things and biting you.
Healthy corals will also fight and exude chemicals that will try to kill other corals (a skimmer should remove these chemicals and the reason I normally run Ozone, Not, as is stated all the time for silly parasite control)
Healthy fish may also jump out as I assume they are stronger swimmers and they tend to chase fish away from their nesting site. In the sea a clownfish for example will chase away fish from a few yards away. Most tanks don't have a few yards so they constantly fight. And spawn.
If a tank is not in the best health, the fish are more lethargic and just want to eat, text and stay alive. Sort of like a lot of people I know.
They don't have much interest in anything. On my job (I was the foreman of sometimes 150 construction workers) I used to call them Doot Da doos
They used to walk around like they were busy, but they weren't doing anything, just going Doot Da Do, Doot Da Do all day.
Semi healthy fish are like that, which is why they get sick and we can enjoy disease threads.
MnFish1
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Why do you think you failed at QT? How did you fail at QT? What is your definition of QT? Im curious not to debate with you -but to figure out what happened. certainly not to change your mind. Likewise, what of the methods in @Paul B's article do you follow? Which ones do you not follow? and why.
Somehow people get the feeling that there is a Pro-QT and an anti QT crowd here - and that everyone is religious about those beliefs. I just want to try to figure out what works for most people
.No one here thinks there is such a thing as a 'sterile reef'. There is not. Every fish thats put into a tank even one treated with copper - has bacteria and other things commensually living with them - same with corals and inverts.
PS - you didnt really answer @Frogger either - he asked if you can't keep fish alive in an observation type quarantine, how can you do it in a community tank? (this also gets to your definition of QT). As I've said perhaps 50 times - I dont personally QT - but I'm really careful where I get my livestock. But - I've also explained 'why' I dont quarantine.
Frogger
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Appears I hit a nerve. Just trying to use a little logic. If you have had success with your method good on you. You should only do what you want to do.
Just because you and your father have had no success at keeping fish alive with a quarantine method doesn't mean that many others have had great success with a quarantine method.
The second part of your statement is coming from left field and have no idea why it was said.
FYI- I have 3 tanks set up:
- 10 gallon fish quarantine tank with live rocks, algae, water movement, lighting, full cuc and often corals.
- 35 gallon full reef tank, dsb, that has been set up for 18 years with corals, fish, a pistol shrimp that is over 20 years old, an original garf bonsai from 2003 and a neon frogspawn that is 15 years old. I use this tank as my coral quarantine tank (4 months minimum) as all permanent coral residents are duplicates of my main display.
- Main display is a Red Sea Reefer 350 that has been only setup for 3 years (still young). This tank is a full reef with mostly sps, acropora and a pair of ocellaris clowns still laying eggs that I have owned since 1997, when I purchased the female from a fellow reefer he had her for 2 to 3 years and she was full grown.
I have been keeping fish since the mid 80's and have had a reef tank in some form or another since the early 90's.
clownfish by Glenn Murray
Hermie
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I had a pair of brackish gobies that constantly spawned but the female eventually exploded because I believe over feeding of pellet food + egg compaction... learned that lesson... big mouthed fish need fresh foods
When pellet comes into the Cichlid hobby back in the 70:ties we learned a lesson with hungry Cichlids. They eat a lot of the pellets; the pellets soak in a lot of water inside the stomach, they swell and Chabang – hole in the belly. It was normal that time to soak the pellets in water prior to the feeding in order to avoid this.
Sincerely Lasse
Sincerely Lasse
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William Buchanan
Community Member
lol [emoji23][emoji23]
I work with some of those people!
I aspire to be one but I’ve only got a couple of years left to get there! Maybe in retirement...
Dana Riddle
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DS
Sorry for the tardy reply - I've been out of town for a rather hectic 4-day vacation (?). Yes, I was the Regional Supervisor for a private contract company and was responsible for water systems for the Hualalai/4 Seasons resorts (one of 17 accounts I had.) In my spare time, I was a mentor at the West Hawaii Explorations Academy on coral science and maintained some of the exhibits at the Natural Energy Laboratory (in conjunction with NOAA's SeaGrant program.) The energy lab was a joy to work with - I had access to shallow and deep seawater feeds and could juggle their ratios to obtain just about any temperature I wanted. Since these were open systems, I didn't have to worry (much) about nutrient control.@Dana Riddle @Lasse @Scrubber_steve @Randy Holmes-Farley @Paul B
When BRS TV pushed their algae filter with 1750 PAR, they used pH of 9 as inverse proof that carbon dioxide was used up during photosynthesis. This is another corellation of supersaturation of oxygen and is the reason for their stellar resuls with SPS dominate tank using algae filtration on steroids.
I am a firm believer in algae filtration. Triton Methodhas put the micro scope on the science. I view it in the macro scope. As a Master Gardner, I work with nature to understand what works best in the ecosystem which we cherish and call our reef tank.
Dana,
Didn’t you retire from munincipal water treatment on the Big Island. If I remember correctly, you were mentor for a high school group that grew coral using algae filtration and natural sunlight. How did you deal with heat gain during hottest part of summer? Did you use Red Ogo and practice nutrient recycling by feeding the fish or did you practice nutrient export and sell for local human consumption.
I presently have a 30’ by 40’ greenhouse that I plan to grow editable seaweed and editable Pacific Shrimp. I currently operate a Outdoor pilot system as 900G split system with 150G Rubbermaid tubs of which only three are operational during the winter as they are countersunk in the ground. The seaweed & zooplankton from this system goes to a LFS in Austin where I get $50 per pound. I plan to step up production in greenhouse after completing major modifications.
HOB Refugium is connected to 120G display tank which is full of Red Planaria. Low light picture does not show it, but when lights come on, the flat worms come out in force.
So are against having UV sterilizers as well?The other way to run a reef tank (No Quarantine)
I was asked by my friend Humblefish to start a thread on my practices of running a tank with no quarantine, hospital tanks, medications, dipping or almost anything else.
It is "not" just to take a fish from a store and drop it in your reef because that fish will probably die. You may not see many spots on fish in a store because just about all stores use medications in their tanks to suppress the parasites. They have to because they get new fish all the time from all over the world and they can't change all the water and sterilize their tanks in between shipments. But all fish are infected in a store and even in the sea. They swim in a soup of parasites, viruses and bacteria, some good, some not so good.
In the sea those pathogens are kept in check by each other as viruses prey on parasites and bacteria and other forces such as things exuded from corals and tend to keep everything in check. Of course they all prey on fish.
But fish have been around almost as long as those things and they evolved long ago to live in harmony with all of them. Fish eat parasites with every meal and those parasites are processed in the fishes kidney among other places and that causes the fish to exude antiparisitic and antibacterial properties in their slime. They constantly do this and it keeps parasites and bacteria from killing the fish even though some parasites will get through to sample some fish flesh.
Anyway, that is the basis for my method that I slowly learned starting in about 1973 when I had to keep fish in copper continuously as we all did. (20 pennies to the gallon) Our tanks were not reefs, we fed flakes, changed the water to much and took out the rocks and dead corals to bleach them whenever they turned green which was almost weekly. The fish were always stressed and it was hard to keep even damsels.
Then I started feeding things other than flakes, things like frozen clams, pieces of fish and live blackworms. In 7 weeks my blue devils spawned and kept spawning for 7 years. Spawning damsels is no great Whop but in those days few people could keep them alive for a few weeks.
I gradually learned that bacteria and parasites would not kill my fish as long as I didn't medicate them. It was backward thinking but remember there was no internet and I didn't even know anyone with a salt tank so I was on my own.
When I added a fish it normally would get spots and sometimes die, but most of the time the spots receded and the fish was fine and didn't get sick when I added a new fish.
That was how I learned my method which is not really a method but a lack of a method.
With my method you can not quarantine because that short circuits the process. I actually want parasites and bacteria as that is what the fish was swimming with in the sea a week before.
I just put the fish in my tank and normally the fish starts eating right away and is fine. About half the time the fish will show a few spots but they are very few and disappear in a day or two. Yes they finished their life cycle on that fish and dropped off to infect something else, but they can't because those fish are constantly exposed to parasites so they are immune.
The things I do “not” do is quarantine.
I do not ever feed dry foods such as flakes or pellets as those foods are sterile.
I do not suck every bit of detritus out of my tank
I do however always feed something with live bacteria in it such as frozen foods.
I feed whole foods with guts such as clams, mysis, mussels and I use LRS foods which is a commercial food which I consider the best. But I still want to give the fish something that I know has living bacteria in it. I try to feed a few times a week some live worms but sometimes I can’t. Where I live now I can’t get them but I do raise live whiteworms which live in dirt. I bought a few of them years ago and that batch is still living and reproducing. I like the worms because of the living bacteria in their guts and the dirt they are living in. Some people that have immune tanks never use live worms so they may not be necessary, but I use them when I can. These things need not be fed every day, but at least occasionally. But all foods should have bacteria in it and if you feed nothing but commercial food, I am not sure how much living bacteria is in that because you don’t know how old it is or what temperature it was stored at.
If you have access to a salt water beach, collect a little mud and sprinkle it around the tank. That is for bacterial diversity. If you can’t get that, you can use garden soil with no pesticides or fertilizer.
(I did not invent that, it was “Robert Straughn” The Father of salt water fish keeping.)
The idea is that I want parasites living in the tank along with the fish. They will keep reproducing and trying to infect fish but they will fail.
I know the argument that there is much more water in the sea than in a tank and the parasites are more numerous. But that is of no consequence because the fishes immune system will get as strong as it needs to be to repel parasites and the more parasites there are, the stronger the immune system.
If you quarantine fish, there will be nothing for the fish to become immune to and any slight infection will crash the tank. Fish are not delicate creatures that need coddling and they almost never get sick. They have a fantastic immune system as long as we don’t try to short circuit it.
I can’t remember the last time I lost a fish to disease but it was probably in the 80s. Virtually all of my fish only die of old age or jumping out. I do lose fish due to my stupidity like if I buy something that I can’t properly feed like shrimpfish, twin spot gobies, orange spotted filefish etc. My tank is not set up for those fish and I should not buy them. But everything else, with no exception live long enough for me to get tired of them and I give them away or they die of old age.
I do not like clownfish but one day about 27 years ago I bought a baby of what I thought was a red hawkfish. It turned out to be a Fireclown and I still have it. She also spawns a few times a week as all my paired fish do as all healthy fish carry eggs all the time.
If you have a tank full of quarantined fish, I am not sure how you could get those fish immune because that quarantining may have destroyed the immune system of those fish. It would be a long process because the fish would have to be infected, and then cured for them to become immune and you may lose some fish.
It would be much easier to start an immune tank from the start. Remember, if you see some parasites, think of that as a good thing and not something that you need to dip or treat. Yes, you may lost some fish in the beginning but your fish will become immune to just about everything and you will never need medications or disease forums. Many fish die in quarantine or right after so that is also not a panacea.
I did not mention parameters because IMO they are not that important for fish health. Corals, yes, but not fish. My nitrates were 160 for years and I never had a fish die and they continued to spawn.
This is my method which has worked well for decades and I never lose fish to disease which is something I think we all strive for.
Dana Riddle
2500 Club Member
Sorry for the late reply - I've been in South Carolina for a rather hectic trip since Thursday. I'll program the data logger tomorrow morning and begin investigations.
Subsea
5000 Club Member
Did Gerald Hesslinger locate IndoPacific SeaFarm at the NOAA SeaGrant facility. I think he got nutrient rich water from > 2000’.
I always wandered how you guys manage the heat gain in outside aquaculture. When I tried corals in a green house, to maintain 75 - 85 degrees ran my utility bill to $1000 at which point I shut the greenhouse down.
I have revised my business plan to include hardy seaweed and critters that live with in like pods, green mollies, sheephead minnows and grass shrimp. I sell this to LFS at $25/lb.
Nema problema - I have been in the south of Sweden - visiting my newest grandchild for three days - I know the problem
But - there was 6 grandchildren, 8 grow ups (at least sort of ) and I´m old enough to say - I´m tierd and been able to sneak away with my labtop Sincerely Lasse
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Paul B
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Yes I am, unless it is a goldfish pond where they make the water nice and clean so you can see the fish, but the goldfish probably disagree.
UV does nothing for water conditions and is just used to kill pathogens (and algae spores) I don't want to kill pathogens as my entire method of keeping a healthy tank involves the fishes immune system dealing with the pathogens naturally.
Subsea
5000 Club Member
Even though Paul & I are two “wild & crazy” guys. We have different views on this that coincidental coincide with our differrent views on foam fractionators. No big deal, it’s a big ocean with room for everyone.
UV sterilizer is indiscriminate in what it does. UV is a component of the energy from the sun but it’s energy is not visible to the naked eye and it will blind you as it destroys organic tissue that is unprotected. Corals brown up to protect themselves against this energy. So, UV sterilizer remove nothing from the water. In the words of @Randy Holmes-Farley, “UV sterilizer rupture cell membrane of bacteria, thus spilling their guts into display tank”. My response was, “I run highly nutrient systems and it feeds my coral & sponges”. While I don’t run UV on all tanks, I use it when deemed necessary.
Protein skimmers are discriminate in that the mechanism used targets a specific area. Protein skimmer bubbles attract bacteria that are alive as it’s removal of organic nutrients not organic waste as vendors choose to word the literature. I consider these bacteria as an important “food web” for my natural filtration reef tank.
@MnFish1 I consider natural filtration synonymous with natural food webs.
Aside for some gas exchange, I see little value in protein skimmers.
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