- Today, the top QT or quarantine misconceptions,
the things that are just actually wrong,
starting with number one,
which is medicated QT is hard, absolutely not true.
- Nope, not true at all.
I think that it scares a lot of people,
and people say that they lose a lot of fish,
maybe that's why they think it's hard.
It's really not, it just the execution
that needs to be modified a little bit.
Through this series we're gonna give you
a protocol to follow.
And if you can do simple things like test copper levels
and do water changes,
you've got it, it's easy.
- Yeah, drudging through all of the opinions
on how to do this is actually the hard part.
The execution of knowledge is actually easy.
So, if you can set up a tank like this one
with an air stone in a heater,
and mix up some copper, a couple medications
in a Brute trash can,
do 100% water change every three days
for a short period of time, you got this.
Number two, the outliers are going to ruin your tank.
Just don't get hung up on the outliers.
This is for the scientific community.
- Yeah, we're going for that 80%,
it's gonna be successful,
20% might feel differently,
but the majority of the people this is gonna help.
And it's the majority that we're striving for.
- This is really hard actually even for Elliot
when we talk about it. (Elliot laughs)
Because it's the edge cases
where the scientific community gets hung up on.
But who we're actually speaking to is the home hobbyist
who wants an easy path to the most success possible,
we call it the 80/20,
meaning 80% of the benefit 20% of the effort.
Number three, there is a best way, not true.
- (laughs) There's a lot of ways
to achieve clean healthy fish.
The way that I like to think about it
is you have a fish in it's pure form, fish only,
no parasites, no bacteria, no nothing.
And what you're really tryna do
is just separate the two.
I try to think about it like you are putting a buffer
in between the fish and the parasite.
And whether that's actually physically moving the fish
with tank transfer or it's using chemicals like copper
to separate, sorry, to prevent that parasite
from re-attaching to the fish.
there's tons of ways to do it,
you just got to follow one protocol and stick to it.
Don't cherry-pick tactics from each one
and then expect it to work well.
- And the net result of this
is there are a hundred different ways to quarantine,
there's a hundred different ways to care for your fish.
And there are even more opinions out there on how to do it,
and it's trudging through all those opinions
that really matters.
This is the advice I'd give.
Pick a doctor that shares your values,
because what you're doing really is picking a fish doctor
in this case, that shares your values
and does this for a living every day.
Like I listen to my doctor
because he treats people every day,
I wouldn't necessarily want one
that does it from his living room,
that hasn't actually seen a patient in a long time.
So, the people...
And I'm just gonna say it,
I've chosen Elliot as my doctor here
because he takes care of fish every single day
for a living, losing them.
I hate to say it this way, but loses profitability.
There's no business if you do this poorly.
And a lot of the other people that I've sought out
actually haven't quarantined to fish in months.
They're not actively seeking out new and better ways.
I can talk to Elliot
and he will think about my opinion on this,
which is, I'm looking for that 80/20 here,
I'm looking for a reasonable path
that we can suggest to other people,
not one that covers our butts on every last edge case.
Number four, QT means the same thing to everyone,
doesn't it?
It Doesn't.
- Nope, not at all.
Anytime you buy fish that are quarantined
try to figure out what that means.
Some places it means that they observe the fish,
some places it means that they medicated the fish.
If they did medicate the fish, what did they do?
What was their protocol like?
Try to figure out how that fish has been treated.
Because I know some people will say,
"We held this fish for 30 days in copper."
But when you find out that the level of copper
was sub-therapeutic,
and then you have a velvet or ich outbreak,
well, that fish wasn't really quarantined,
you were just masking the symptoms.
- So, the answer is not only at the store,
the quarantine can be different,
it could be a three day quarantine,
it could be 30 days, it could be medicated, it couldn't be.
But the only way you really know is if you ask.
And so, ask the store that you're buying for what it means.
And I trust them that it's working for them
until they give me reason to believe that it doesn't.
When you're having those conversations online,
recognize everybody who's talking about quarantine
is almost always talking about something totally different
and non-inclusive.
So, you have to dig in a little bit deeper
and find out what people really mean when they say QT.
Number five, visual QT has no value, untrue.
- Yeah, I mean when we described
all those non-infection type of symptoms for fish,
the fish is tired, stuff like that, when it's compromised,
those are the type of things that you'll find out
if the fish is carrying something.
Doing visual just to see,
it's always better than not doing anything at all.
Because like we said in the previous episode,
if you bought a fish and then three days later
it turned out to have velvet,
wouldn't it be a lot better that it had velvet
in the observation tank and didn't in your display.
- So, here's a reality of it,
is if you're asking somebody to do a medicated QT
at the store, you will probably know
that they actually did it from one discernible factor,
it cost three times as much as if they didn't.
They had to hold onto that fish
for as long as a month in many cases
to actually perform that process properly.
So, if it doesn't cost three times as much,
it probably wasn't done that way.
But there is value in visual QT
when I wanna keep the prices down,
and especially if I'm gonna do that QT at my own house,
I'm gonna do the medicated QT.
Because there is a difference
between seeing a fish that is in a community tank
and that just doesn't look good,
between one that was actually isolated in its own tank
has been sitting there for a week or two
and still looks healthy, active,
it doesn't have any of the signs of the fin issues
or the cloudy eyes.
Visual QT does have some value,
not the gold standard, million miles from that,
but it is better than nothing.
Number six, it isn't worth the time
to perform a medicated QT,
if I don't do it on every last fish
or if I didn't do it on the previous ones, untrue.
- Yeah, you could have a tank
and when let's say you first set it up,
you notice you had ich, there's ich in the tank
you're practicing ich management,
that's great, that's no reason that you shouldn't do it
because what you don't want is to also then put velvet
or Brook, Uronema or flukes in there,
it's a game of preventing loss, all avenues.
- You said it perfect.
Just because I have flukes or just because have ich,
does not mean I want velvet,
does not mean that I want Brook
and you can solve this, it's all a numbers game.
Everything less than perfect reduces the chances of success.
But that doesn't mean that it ensures failure.
And in fact, I see this debate happen all the time
which is basically that,
if you're not gonna do it from the beginning,
you might as well not do it at all
or you didn't do it already, you're doomed.
Don't bother with it anymore.
This mentality is the enemy of progress.
- Yeah.
- If you want to do better start today
and we can work from there.
- Yep, I mean, I think the gold standard
should definitely be, let's aim for eradication,
but if we end up doing management,
it's still better than nothing at all.
- Number seven closely related to that medicated QT
isn't worth my time.
If I didn't QT every last coral
or if I'm unwilling to do it in the future, untrue.
- Yeah, it's a numbers game.
The corals they're significantly
less likely to hold fish parasites, but it's still possible.
I always tell people, anytime anything's wet
and it's coming from another system,
there's a chance for bringing parasites in there.
But the more that you're doing
and the more that you can do towards eradication,
the better if you only do it with zoanthids,
because they're easy to QT,
then you don't do it with SPS,
it's still better than doing nothing.
- To say that it's not worth doing.
Unless you quarantine every coral,
again, man, is the enemy of progress.
The goal of progress is actually just to do it better
than we were doing it yesterday.
Put one foot in front of the other one.
I often think of this, every time I go see my doctor
he tells me, stop eating all the pizza
get on the treadmill for three hours a day,
lift weight, do all that stuff.
But he'd actually just be happy if I got in the treadmill
for a half hour and limited pizza to twice a week.
So, that is the goal.
We need to find progress, stop being the enemy of that,
and help people find just another step forward
with the goal of best practice in the end.
Number eight, a properly medicated quarantine fish
won't get sick in my tank, untrue, sad as it is.
- Yeah, unfortunately the reality
is that fish that go through quarantine
doesn't really matter if it's already in the display tank.
Their chest is susceptible if not more.
A lot of the times we do use medications
that will unfortunately suppress fish's immune system,
which if you have an active outbreak
that fish is a lot more likely to actually get sick.
But this is again where we're aiming for eradication,
as being the gold standard
and we're doing all management things
in the interim to kind of better our odds.
- I've seen this conversation online before,
which is I bought a medicated QT fish
that didn't have any disease on it
or wherever it was claimed to.
And then it got sick soon as I added it to my tank.
Well, the reality is that fish
is actually the most likely to get sick
in a tank that has parasites in it
because all the rest of 'em are accustomed to that.
Their immune systems are wrapped around that.
Now that doesn't mean that QT is bad in this case,
it means that you gotta consider that.
It means when you see an active outbreak
don't put it in there.
Use the management methods,
reduce the populations of parasites
with either the sediment filter or the UV.
We need to think about how to approach diet.
We think about sourcing the fish.
So, it was healthy to begin with,
medicate the thing
to make sure it doesn't add in new diseases.
And then even the isolation box to reduce the stress
put more effort into it.
And none of this will be true.
Number nine, the QT or quarantined fish
will be the last to get sick.
And it's just totally untrue.
- Yeah, unfortunately the reality
is it's probably gonna be the first,
you already have a bunch of established fish in the tank,
that new fish coming out of QT,
you could have a mildly suppressed immune system
and it's also not comfortable in that environment yet.
It is like the most susceptible patient
in a hospital type of thing.
- Yeah, and it's not just true of the QTd fish.
It's the stress the fish
that went through all of the transport
from Fiji all the way here, QTd or not.
That means that it is going to be a stressful event.
We can do all the things that we just mentioned
in the last one to reduce that stress.
But it's still important
because we don't want this fish to add more parasites
to the fish that are already in there.
Number 10, this one's gonna kill everybody
but medicated QT will get rid of everything.
Totally untrue.
- Yeah, (laughs) it is unfortunate.
But the reality is that you're dealing with live organisms.
You're dealing with protozoan
that can replicate incredibly fast
and also transmit through air.
the chances of a home hobby
is being able to perform everything
with a hundred percent bio-security.
It's very low but obviously do the best you can.
- This isn't hard.
So, if you actually follow the rules on here,
99% of the parasites will not enter your tank.
If you don't follow it totally precisely
but you get most of it right,
probably 80% reduction in parasites added to the tank.
The reality is we're all human.
We learn how to do it a little bit better every single time.
Some of us have closer attention to details than others.
And some parasites are super human.
Number 11, I can medicate in a reef tank
meaning I can actually treat four many parasites
in the tank, kinda.
- Yeah, not really.
You could and then you could try
to suck all the medication out later
but when you're gonna be putting expensive corals in there,
it's really not worth the risk.
It's really more about trying to prevent
the parasites from getting in there.
And it's about trying to maintain a clean tank
opposed to one that's being managed.
- There's always beliefs
of copper's gonna leach out of everything.
Who wants to find that out?
Who wants to be worried about that in the future?
Now it's true that you could medicate for many diseases
in a fish only tank, right?
- Definitely right.
- Right in the tank
you could do it a lot easier in some ways,
however these medications are actually really hard
on the fish. - Yeah.
It's very very taxing on the body to say
at least and if you're gonna quarantine a fish,
wouldn't you rather have that fish
be in isolated tank like this,
for a duration of two to four weeks,
opposed to, if you're gonna do it in the tank,
you might have to treat an anywhere from six weeks
to 76 days.
- So, Elliot's general advice to me
was if you're gonna do a medicare at QT
keep it in there about 14 days clean
meaning from the last time that you saw
any sign of that disease.
In a actual tank where all those are still in there,
well, now it's six weeks to 76 days
of exposure to the medication.
Probably it's maybe easier,
but probably not the most responsible path
for caring for the fish.
Number 12, in a medicated quarantine
water changes specifically big ones
are stressful on the fish, untrue, double untrue.
- Yeah, it's probably the most important part
of the protocol that I personally do,
both marine collectors and for my personal fish,
it's just simply said clean water
fish are definitely gonna be happier in there.
It's not just ammonia,
you're worried about stress hormone.
You're worried about all of the unmeasurable things
that are building up in the water,
just because you don't have ammonia
doesn't mean that the water's not dirty,
and fish feel that which adds stress,
which a lot of time will feed them to be compromised
and not do well in quarantine.
The concept of like, okay, well, I've got a quarantine tank,
we'll change out 25% of the water once a week.
It's inadequate, and it's the wrong way to do it.
- Yeah, 25% means that 75% is still there.
- Yeah.
- So, the method that you're going to see here
that he shared with us
is that it's based almost
on 100% water changes or as much as you can get outta there.
Now I think the mentality on this is based on
thought process of stability
and small changes over time and all that kind of thing
I don't disagree with that,
and that's why you would make sure that
the water is actually the same salt water that you mixed up.
You mix up one single batch for this whole process,
you add in the copper and the medication.
It's the same medication in there that's in the tank.
You get the right temperature.
And the 100% water change is the water that was in there
without all the stress hormone and toxins in ammonia.
So, clean, healthy water, the heart of all of this.
Next eradication, the gold standard,
the piece that everyone talks about,
in the playlist right here, that's what's coming up.