Quarantine.

There is a substitute for Quarantine. It is called Luck. A quarantine tank is one of the most potent tools for success in keeping fish. Anyone who tells you differently is pandering to your inertia and laziness. If you are consistent and meticulous about using the Q Tank you may be rewarded by only rarely using it as a hospital.

"Pass all newly-acquired fishes through a full month's quarantine." This is one of the best pieces of advice that I can offer you. You don't even have to have one tank permanently dedicated to quarantine. As I first wrote this I had five new Otocinclus affinis acclimatizing all by themselves in a densely-planted 10-gallon tank. (The former occupant had been moved out before they were released: you can't overlap quarantines.) Otos often seem quite resistant to Ich. But they die in droves when they first come home. Perhaps long fasts have terminally weakened these little herbivores. At any rate they were adjusting to the particular bacterial community and other microfauna of my systems, and after a month the four survivors went to work in other planted tanks. As I re-edit much later, the same tank now has a sole Ram, who has been in Quarantine for weeks and weeks, because just when I think he's clean at last, I catch him furtively rubbing one gill or the other on plant leaves.

I can think of four reasons to run a quarantine:

First, you get a chance for a month's evaluation and close surveillance of new fishes. Incubation periods of parasites like Ich may need more than a single life-cycle to become obvious. Intestinal parasites are even more insidious; they may not become manifest for several weeks after an outwardly-healthy fish is introduced. In the Q Tank I set up retreats such as a broken flowerpot or a hollow log, so that fishes can take cover, but I position these hideouts where I can keep a close discreet watch over them. Quarantine gives me a chance to get to know the intimate details of color and shape and the behavior of a species that's new to me. There's no rule that says you can't start enjoying your new fishes til they're out of quarantine.

Second, quarantine isolation reduces the risk of introducing parasites and disease to the population of your densely-aquascaped aquaria, where netting out a still-lively but infected fish might be extremely disruptive. Even just about impossible. Sometimes pathogens can be transmitted on contaminated equipment--— wet nets are great offenders here--— and you should be constantly aware that the Q Tank must remain isolated. Absolutely nothing is to be shared between the Q Tank and your other captive communities. Even your hand needs to be scrubbed if you've dipped it in the Q Tank--— even though no infection has yet appeared in quarantine.

Third, the new fishes get a month's respite after all the traumas of shipping: the abrasions, the competition and crowding in holding tanks, constant alarm, traces of ammonia and nitrite, changes of pH, etc. They're jet-lagged and need to recuperate. In quarantine they have a chance to adjust to the conditions you'll be providing, without having to deal just yet with the normal community competition. You often give a female who has just spawned or given birth a time of recovery before returning her to the community. Think how much more stressful than a spawning the recent experiences of your new fishes have been.

Fourth, drug administration is cheaper and more convenient. If the Q Tank contains ten gallons, you'll need less than a fifth the medication you'd need to be treating a 55-gal. tank. How many times would you have to use the tank for it to pay for itself in this way alone?

Convenience extends to the adjustable nature of Q Tank decor. Plants for the Q Tank should be floating ones, like Water Sprite, or ones grown on coconut shells, like Anubias and Java Fern, so that plants can be removed before medications are introduced that would stress them. The plants can spend some time in a big bowl in a brightly-lit window and come back to their Q-Tank nursery when conditions permit. Dissolved organics are easily handled in a Q Tank. They can interfere with the oxidative effects of some medications, but in a 10-gallon Q Tank you can reduce levels of dissolved organics with a large water change and some hydrogen peroxide before medicating. And it's easy to do a large water change afterwards, too.

The most usual excuse not to operate a quarantine is lack of space. The Q Tank doesn't usually have to be bigger than 10 gallons. The Q Tank doesn't absolutely have to remain operating all the time, though the filter system for it does. A well-cycled sponge filter can operate discreetly at the back of a show tank until you need it. You don't want any ammonia or nitrite to appear, just when fishes are at their most vulnerable. Plants actively scavenge ammonia, so the Q Tank can double as a plant nursery, as long as the plants can be removed during some medications. The Q Tank/Plant Nursery doesn't have to be ugly. You're allowed to enjoy looking at the fishes you have in quarantine.

Alternately, you can quarantine fish in a Rubbermaid storage container, like Melanie, who posted at AC, March 2002:

"You don't need an extra tank to QT. Here's how I've had success:

"I have a 14 gallon Rubbermaid storage container that makes an excellent QT for new fish. I don't have to use a heater in the winter. When I place it in my baby's room right near the space heater, the temp maintains at ~78F. In the summer I use a smaller 50 Watt Tronic heater. I have a Regent filter for a 15 gallon tank that fits right on the side of the Rubbermaid plastic container. I keep some sponge media in one of my larger filters on the 55 gallon to use in the Regent HOB for QT fish. The sponge is disposable if the fish need to be treated with any meds. The main point is that you can have an instantly cycled tank just by transfering the filter media.

"If you don't have an extra small filter lying around, you can use an airstone and do daily water changes. When I used an airstone to QT my gold nugget, I changed about 2 gallons every a.m. and p.m., using water from the tank that the fish would be placed in.

"I used a piece of driftwood from the big tank for shelter in the QT, and also threw in a plastic plant to give floating cover.

"QT'ing in a bare bottom tank let me see what was going into the fish and what was coming out of the fish."

How long? "Quarantine" comes from the French expression for "forty days." It can't be shortened, or it will be severely compromised. Three weeks is often mentioned, and Mike Wickham, in his usually dependable Complete Idiot's Guide to Freshwater Aquariums even suggests two weeks, but Ich that are newly-settled on the fish may not grow to visible size or begin to cause noticeable stress to the fish for fully a month. Would two weeks be "better than nothing," or would it lull you into a false sense of security? viz. "But I did a quarantine for my fish--— I guess Ich was lurking dormant in my tanks."

Remember, if any fish in quarantine comes down with disease, you turn back the clock once it is cured and start again. Sometimes aquarists will treat fishes in quarantine for an outbreak of Ich, and then blithely turn them loose in a show tank a few days after visible symptoms are gone, because quarantine is "up." And the fishes that never show symptoms are just as much "in quarantine" as the fish that are obviously under attack.

What's involved? First, give them a prophylactic salt bath right in the transfer bucket. Separately dissolve 5 tablespoons of common salt (NaCl) per gallon of water. Add half the solution to the transfer bucket, wait ten minutes and add the other half. Keep an eye on the new fish and remove any at the first signs of distress. Leave them for a further 15 to 30 minutes. Jim Anderson of the Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, noted (in TFH, April 1998) that public aquaria widely use a saltwater dip for all their new freshwater arrivals, at full-strength salinity (35 parts per thousand), for ten minutes. A major reminder is that common salt (NaCl) doesn't affect the pH buffer, but "Marine" salt and so-called "Aquarium" salt do. A change in pH, rather than the salt itself, accounts for most of the stress in a salt dip, it appears. Jim Anderson hasn't found any freshwater fish that can't take this ten-minute bath. (If your fish did show acute stress you'd remove it, though.) Net them out and transfer them to the Q Tank. Hopefully they should have left behind most of their ectoparasites.

Then, give the new arrivals 24 to 48 hours to settle down. Give them time to recover from stresses, get some color, and get their respiration rate back to normal, while you scrutinize them. The first treatment in the Q Tank should be an anti-helminthic (anti-nematode) treatment for intestinal parasites. The Shedd Aquarium de-worms with Panacur or praziquantel, the Shedd's Jim Anderson wrote in TFH, April 1998, p. 52. Praziquantel is just becoming available to aquarists . Currently I add a freshly-made-up solution of Praziquantel to the Q Tank, at a strength of 2 ppm, to eliminate any skin and gill flukes. If pond-raised fishes surprise you by expelling a tapeworm while being medicated with prazi, I'd like to hear about it.

What a Quarantine tank requires. First of all, a Q Tank needs a dependable heater that you can adjust without a struggle. And a dependable thermometer. Clean water, chlorine- and ammonia-free, with the addition of 20% or so clean water from a suitable, disease-free (of course) aquarium. The water should contain only minimal dissolved organic carbon, however. I always include a thin layer of gravel, to give the fishes a sense of security, even if I take the trouble to boil it afterwards. An air pump is going to come in handy, as some medications, such as formalin, reduce the available oxygen; and you'll need the air pump to run a sponge filter. A Q Tank needs to have perfectly cycled, stable filtration that is capable of coping with all the ammonia the fishes can produce. There can be no ammonia or nitrite spikes, however "minor," during quarantine: quarantine tanks must be stable. Leave the bottled bacterial boosters alone, as usual. Instead, half an inch of well-cured gravel, an h.o.t. filter with well-aged media, plus an air-driven, well-aged sponge filter, should suffice. Don't automatically boil and bleach any of these items, either before or after: once quarantine is over, sponges and other filter materials that are allowed to run for a couple of weeks in a fish-free aquarium (the empty Q-tank, for example) won't transmit parasites, unless you've detected Pleistophora or Camallanus. Then you should boil or discard everything that's been in the Q tank.

With a Q-tank that is already "cycled", don't overload the system by overstocking the Q-tank. Easy does it. You'll surely be running another quarantine soon after this one is completed.

Quarantine your plants, too, and you'll never be innundated with unwanted snails, or terrorized by Hydra. A short-term bath of potassium permanganate will eliminate animal hitch-hikers. George Booth recommended a ten-minute bath at a concentration of 10mg/liter, in Aquarium Fish, June 1994. Alum baths are often recommended as an alternative.

Don't forget to offer the use of your quarantine tank to your friends. You'll be able to ask a favor in return some day, perhaps when you're going on vacation. And meanwhile you may have an opportunity to live closely for a month with some fishes you might never otherwise come to know.