Hello from Jimmy and Jenny

[jimandjen]

Good morning everyone,

We are new to the hobby and falling in love with it quickly! We currently have a 90 gallon show tank with a Marine Betta Grouper and Yellow Tang that have been tank mates for years. We bought the system already established and are eager to add more fish to our Show Tank.

We just recently introduced a juvenile blue hippo, a pair of juvenile oscellaris clowns, 3 Nerith snails, 3 Cerith snails, and an young 6 line wrasse to our 20 gallon QT. It had a couple of small pieces of live rock. Unfortunately the wrasse died on day 3 and hippo showed salt speckled white spots. We took out all six snails and the live rock and put them into a bucket and have been dropping salinty in our QT tank for the last couple of days. We will get to 1.010 SG today and have temp holding at 80 degrees. Therefore today will begin our 6 week hypo QT countdown. Our question for yall is this....
The bucket that has our six new snails and the little bit of live rock that could contain contaimination of Crypt needs to move forward to get back to our show tank. No fish are in it but if we have Crypt encyst stages, will we need to keep them in the bucket for the same six weeks that the fish are in QT as well?. Our LFS instructed us to float the inverts and put into the show tank. We luckily were cautious and need some advice. Will Crypt die in our fallow bucket within days or do they need to stay in the bucket at regular salinty for a complete 6 weeks? The bucket doesn't have anything but saline water in it but we want to save our snails. Please advise. :^:
Good day all!

 

[Bifferwine]

Hi and welcome! Glad you found us.

It's extremely rare that snails could carry ich to your tank -- it has happened, but it's not something that any of us seem to worry about. Hell, most of us don't even bother to quarantine our fish! Haha. In 99.9% of cases, if you have good water quality and a stress-free environment for your fish, ich will never present itself. And if fish do get it, they will be healthy enough to fight it off on their own.

How do you know that the main tank doesn't already have ich? Do you know that the tang and betta were quarantined and medicated/hypo'd correctly before they were added to the tank? Unless they were, you quarantining future fish is fruitless. They will just be exposed to the parasite as soon as they are added to the display tank. Unless every single fish has been quarantined, there's a really good chance that you have ich in your tank already from the prior two fish. Just because you have never seen spots on them doesn't mean the tank is ich free -- you can have ich in your tank and never see it on any fish.

I do think that adding 4 fish to a 20 gallon quarantine tanks is way too much. Those fish must be stressed to the max. If you are going to quarantine, you should quarantine each fish individually, unless you bought a pair (like your clowns).

When you do add new fish, add no more than 1 fish every 3 weeks. The tank does require some time between additions to adjust to the increased bioload.

Hope this helps a bit... I think quarantining fish is a good idea, but you have to do it from the start (from the addition of the very first fish) for it to be effective.

 

[yote]

Welcome aboard Jim and Jen.
Go a head and the snails and rock to your display tank.Its not going to hurt anything.
Buying an established system with fish in it,you have no way of knowing if there is ick in there or not anyway.
But the snails probably wont survive 6 weeks in the bucket.There just not going to be enough food for them.

 

[dcantucson]

I agree with Biff, but would add a suggestion of getting an UV light for your system.
Welcome to the forum.