Quarantine tank equipment question

[mrsjoannh13]

hello everyone and happy Thanksgiving weekend! I have a few questions about quarantine tanks as I'm just now setting one up....

I am planning on getting 1 or 2 fish from PetCo for my daughter's tank. I wouldn't ordinarily buy from there, but the LFS does not stock the type of fish we need. So I plan on quarantining the fish but had a quick question....

Do you have ALL separate (dedicated) supplies for a quarantine tank? Bucket, gravel vac, net, etc? Or is this overkill? I don't want to cross contaminate if there is an illness in the tank, but also don't want to buy an entirely new set of tank supplies if it's not necessary. Obviously it would have a dedicated filter and possibly heater but just wondering about all the other stuff.

Thanks so much!

 

[mcordelia]

Hi! Happy turkey weekend! There are several schools of thought on your questions, but my personal thoughts are:

1) parasite life cycles are 4-6 weeks, so 6 weeks is "best", however two weeks is better than nothing since I would argue that most fish brought home start to show signs within 2 weeks. (To wax philosophical, it's the "long tail phenomenon": 95% of people who get covid will get symptoms or text positive within 5-9 days of exposure, and of the remaining 5%, most who show symptoms will show them within 14 days, and then there will be some who never show signs despite having the illness. Same probably applies to some extent to various fish diseases)

2) I would deworm based on @Colin_T 's instructions, and probably have some salt running in the tank if the particular fish is relatively salt tolerant. Probably on a case-by case basis though (were there dead fish in the store tank? How does the fish look after you get them into the bag, etc)

3) agree

4) I have two nets but so far no other duplicates. I would probably get another gravel vac if there was an outbreak in the QT, but I don't think there is a a point having duplicates of things until you need them. So to your question: yes on duplicates are good, but probably on a case-by-case basis / not worth acquiring ahead of time until needed.

Interested in others views on this as well.

 

[Essjay]

I have 2 siphons and 2 water change buckets already - one for each tank. I use a third siphon for the quarantine tank but I use one of the buckets I already have and do the water change on the QT after the other tanks so the bucket has a week to thoroughly dry before the next use. I can't guarantee a siphon tube will have totally dried in a week which is why I use a separate one for the QT.

I use the same net but allow it to totally dry before using it again.