Fish meds?

[beatking]

When introducing new fish, should one add meds (ich, eryth, or tet) to the water as an aid to ward off potential illnesses? Or is this just hooie? Thanks

Steve

 

[outofwater]

Welcome to the forum, no meds unless you know for sure fish have something spwcific that needs to be treated, and if that's the case you would be better off treating them in a separate quarantine tank or container instead of your main tank . Only recommendation would be to add "bacteria in a bottle" to help boost your tank existing bacteria colony, which would happen naturally anyway over time as the ammonia levels rise with the newcomers.

 

[beatking]

Thank you very much

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

Hi and welcome to the forum!
I'd recommend a quarantine tank for any new fish to isolate and observe them separately from the fish in your display tank firstly. A lot of people skip this, until a disease makes its way into their main tanks and they wind up having to treat all of them, or losing a lot of their stock! Much more difficult and expensive to treat main tanks than it is a small quarantine tank after all.

Doesn't have to be a full on, permanent set up either, you can make a perfectly serviceable temporary quarantine out of a (food safe) plastic storage tote:

Some people medicate in quarantine, some don't - most of us prefer to avoid meds unless absolutely needed - meds add stress to fish, and new fish are already stressed. Antibiotics are already over-used to the point of becoming useless and putting lives at risk - the exception for some of us are worming meds. I now worm fish in quarantine since dealing with worms in my main tanks, since they're so common in your average fish store fish, and since fish can look fine for months while carrying worms and spreading them to the rest of the tank, before you see the signs, so they're something you might not always spot while they're in quarantine. But not everyone does worm while in quarantine, so that's a judgement call for each keeper to make!