The "Quarantine" tank

[MedievalITGuy]

So I've always heard this was a thing, and I guess it's time happened in my house.

 

Ever since we first set up our 5g pico aquarium, my wife has wanted a yellow clown goby. After  searching one for several months without any luck, we ended up getting a skunk clown fish instead. Of course, after putting him in the main display, we discovered he had ich. So we set up the ancient nano-cube 6 that I've had since high-school as a hypo-salinity hispital tank, and placed him and our Randall's goby in for treatment. After about 3 months of getting the salinity down, worrying daily about alk and ammonia levels, and finally bringing them back up, they got happily re-released into our main 5g. 

 

I decided to leave the tank up for a couple more weeks, as it was already cycled by this point. Lo and behold, we picked up a batch of corals from a local reefer breaking down his tank, and into the nano-cube they went for observation and algae eradication. Fast forward a couple batches of corals later, and we had pretty much decided that we were keeping the tank up for ongoing coral quarantining.

 

 

So now, with a full batch of corals in QT, waiting to be distributed, we walked into the LFS to get some replacement cleanup crew, and what do we find? A perfect little yellow clown goby, poking curiously around the front glass, trying to get a look at us! We tried to be responsible, and walked out without him, but we hadn't been in the car for a minute before we decided we had to go back for him. 

 

Our "Quarantine" tank has now officially been christened a display tank, with the addition of this cuteness.

 

 

 

Unfortunately he has ich too, which we knew was a possibility when we got him. The front display tank at our local shop has a dozen small cubes that are all interconnected, and the shop keeper warned us that there had been some cysts on him that the cleaner shrimp had eaten off. So he's now in his own little bowl for the next month or two, while we treat him for that, and let any ich die off of the corals in the actual QT tank. While I like the idea of rescuing fish, I don't think we'll be getting any more from this shop, as it's pretty obvious that they don't QT well enough for ich and other parasites. It's a shame, because they get some cool stuff in, but I don't really need another 2 hospital tanks springing up in the next year 

 

 

[Mark1313]

Thanks for this. I have ich in my 6.6gal main tank and I'm trying to justify how and why to set up a quarantine. Besides the help that it will do, just seems such a large amount of work for a tank the same size as my main tank. 

Maybe I can just have tank 2 in the future. 

Thanks for the ideas?

 

[MedievalITGuy]

On 11/17/2017 at 6:00 PM, Mark1313 said:

Thanks for this. I have ich in my 6.6gal main tank and I'm trying to justify how and why to set up a quarantine. Besides the help that it will do, just seems such a large amount of work for a tank the same size as my main tank. 

Maybe I can just have tank 2 in the future. 

Thanks for the 

 

I basically got all of my info on Hypo-salinity treatment  from this post, if that helps you get through your outbreak. http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forum/index.php?threads/a-hyposalinity-treatment-process.23131/

 

I went through the same debate about setting up a QT tank, and only ended up with one because of the ich incident.  The joke with this tank is that it was supposed to be for QT, but is now very much not any more. I probably will still keep it bare bottom so that it's easy to clean and maintain, and keep a section free for new corals that will be going into other tanks . Right now it's set up so I can literally pull everything out and put it in a bucket while I scrub down the whole tank, and I like that for ease of maintenance. There's so much rock in my main display tank, that it's a pain to clean anything, and by contrast this tank is a pleasure to work in.

 

If you're going to be adding more fish to your tank, I would definitely recommend setting up a QT tank and just let it run bare-bottom. If you're going to stick with only the fish you currently have, I'd say you don't need one after you get rid of the Ich (using hyposalinity or copper treatment). People don't usually QT corals, I just did it because I didn't have any coral dip on hand, and the QT tank was already cycled after the fish left. Removing corals from their frag plugs, and then dipping them is what most people usually do for new corals.

 

Ideally, you want to either keep an up and running QT, or you want to keep a bit of filter media somewhere in your main tank, so you can have a fully-cycled tank ready to go. When we went through the first outbreak of Ich, the poor clown had a pretty bad case of it, so I actually ended up cycling the tank with the fish in it, just to get the treatment started. Obviously this is less than ideal, and meant I had to do a lot of water changes. It was a pain in the butt, because not only did I need to keep regular salinity water on hand for the main display, I also had to keep a batch that matched the hyposaline level in the treatment tank 

 

[MedievalITGuy]

So I came back from Christmas weekend to find this. It's kind of alarming that so much hair algae has grown in such a short time, but it's not growing elsewhere, so I guess I've got myself an impromptu algae scrubber now!

 

 

 

[Oldsalt01]

Now THAT is a beautiful crop of GHA! Check your phosphates. Bet they're up there. How's the Goby doing? I've had one in QT for almost 3 months and he's the most shy fish I've ever seen. He'll be going in the 14g BC in a couple of weeks, and I'm hoping the Ocellaris bully that lives there won't mess with him.