quarantine, what would you do?

[baxterdawg]

Hey all,

I am recently back in the hobby after several years out and have decided to incorp. a quarantine process because of the new tank is a 125 mixed reef. At the moment, I only have a 10 gal quarantine set up and have a coral beauty and a small flasher wrasse in it. Both fish are doing well, eating good, very active, and overall look really healthy, they never had any indication of sickness upon purchasing from the LFS.

My thought is this, from a risk assessment perspective, do I try to have them go the entire 6 weeks in quarantine for the obvious purpose of going beyond the ~4 week cycle of ick, assuming they may be carriers, but not sick. Or do I make the decision to put them in the display tank early to offset the potential stress of the inherent issues of salinity fluctuations with maintaining a small tank. At the present, a larger quarantine is not really an option.

I hope the general idea is clear. Maybe my assumptions are all wrong, so I was curious what everyone's thoughs were. As a final disclaimer to my question, if it were a tang, I would go the entire time in QT, but maybe wrongly, I was thinking that the fish I have were less prone to ick.

[Shooter7]

"inherent issues of salinity fluctuations with maintaining a small tank"? I don't have any inherent issues with maintaining the salinity of my 10g tank. You get it set and pour a little topoff into it and it maintains fine. Or are you running hypo in this tank, which would, indeed, be somewhat more sensitive to maintaining the 1.009 salinity with daily evap. I'm a strong believer in putting all new fish through QT and I don't shortcut any of them. Matter of fact, unless there is a specific concern with a particular type of fish having a problem with hypo, I hypo all my fish as well. All of my fish are healthy and don't go into my display until they have gone through the time in hypo and are eating well and healthy acting/appearing. Not a 100% guarantee of not passing any disease into the tank, but it gives me a good shot, I think. There are plenty of people who will pop up and say that they just put their fish into their display and everything's been fine. I suppose it could be, but I don't feel like taking the chance, then having to net out all my fish from my display to put in a hospital tank or, worse yet, have a lot of losses. To each their own, though, and this is just how I do mine.

With regards to the fish, I've seen plenty of coral beauty angels with ich. Watch the flasher, I had a carpenter's wrasse and up until today, it was the only fish I had lost due to jumping. Good luck.

[Kathy55g]

I have read, and it has been my experience, that fish do not have a problem with rapid changes in salinity if it is going from concentrated to more dilute. You can just dump in the freshwater. Evaporation happens more slowly, and that is fine, too, as the fish become acclimated to it. You do not, however, want there to be a rapid change in salinity in the other direction: fresher to saltier.

Of course the ideal would be to replace the evaporated water as it is evaporated, and there are simple, cheap setups that will do this for you, but I think it is more important for corals than for fish to maintain constant salinity.