Montiman
Valuable Member
I have an in between view of QT. I have been reefing for about 10 years and have never had a major disease outbreak. I believe I have had at least 7 tanks in that time plus the many tanks I set up and maintained while working at an LFS for 5 years.
The thing with QT is that it does work kinda. The average person is not a research scientist. I have toured a couple public aquariums and they report that after a 60 day medicated QT on all fish with full time staff watching the fish in a separate room where the staff washes their hands and steps through a foot bath when entering and leaving the room they have still gotten ich in their main system. I just don't think eliminating disease is a realistic goal for the average person.
All that being said Ich is not the worst disease in the world, velvet, brook, uronema, worm infections, and parasitic crustaceans are all worse than Ich, but they are much much easier to deal with in QT. I have personally seen all of these infections while working at the LFS and all of them can be dealt with easily with Copper, Formalin, and Prazi. I do believe that buying fish that have been proactively treated to eliminate the most deadly fish diseases is a good idea, but it is no guarantee that your tank will not get disease. Eliminating disease is just wishful thinking.
Given that an aquarium will have some disease it is best to feed fish a balanced healthy diet, employ UV if possible and don't stress if something starts scratching. Leave it alone, don't remove all of the fish and go fallow, simply maintain good reef keeping practices.
Don't see the presence of Ich or uronema as a death sentence. Aquabiomics reports uronema is in 9% of tanks tested but only an issue in less than half of them. I bet that this is an overestimate of how problematic uronema is as often people only pay for an expensive test when something is going wrong. I bet 85% off tanks with Ich have a non problematic infection. If you purchase good healthy fish that have had a basic prophylactic treatment this is often all that is needed to have success.
The thing with QT is that it does work kinda. The average person is not a research scientist. I have toured a couple public aquariums and they report that after a 60 day medicated QT on all fish with full time staff watching the fish in a separate room where the staff washes their hands and steps through a foot bath when entering and leaving the room they have still gotten ich in their main system. I just don't think eliminating disease is a realistic goal for the average person.
All that being said Ich is not the worst disease in the world, velvet, brook, uronema, worm infections, and parasitic crustaceans are all worse than Ich, but they are much much easier to deal with in QT. I have personally seen all of these infections while working at the LFS and all of them can be dealt with easily with Copper, Formalin, and Prazi. I do believe that buying fish that have been proactively treated to eliminate the most deadly fish diseases is a good idea, but it is no guarantee that your tank will not get disease. Eliminating disease is just wishful thinking.
Given that an aquarium will have some disease it is best to feed fish a balanced healthy diet, employ UV if possible and don't stress if something starts scratching. Leave it alone, don't remove all of the fish and go fallow, simply maintain good reef keeping practices.
Don't see the presence of Ich or uronema as a death sentence. Aquabiomics reports uronema is in 9% of tanks tested but only an issue in less than half of them. I bet that this is an overestimate of how problematic uronema is as often people only pay for an expensive test when something is going wrong. I bet 85% off tanks with Ich have a non problematic infection. If you purchase good healthy fish that have had a basic prophylactic treatment this is often all that is needed to have success.
