I'm happy to report all 5 species (Naso, Two spot, Lavendar, Chocolate Mimic, Blue throat jaw) all survived shipping. After an hour "fast drip" acclimation i plopped them in with a cup. Within an hour, all were eating (except for that Copperband, still reluctant). I am quite pleased with how fast they acclimated. I knew the signs were good when the tangs very quickly started picking at rock and were active. Even the blue throat, infamous for hiding, was out in an hour, swimming about.
Before the tang police come get me, I'm fully aware the Naso and Hippo will need to be rehomed. I actually thought this through. The Naso is considered having the lowest aggression and it certainly shows with my specimen. It's the smallest fish in the tank (besides the clowns and goby). The Purple, Naso, Two Spot, Hippo are all different genus. This is not foolproof obviously in terms of getting everyone to behave, but it does help. The Lavendar and Chocolate are both Acanthurus, but both came from Salgado and were introduced at the same time. The Hippo and Naso will eventually outgrow my 150, but by then I should have a 250+ setup. The rest of the tangs are well within the tank limits, with plenty of rock for territories.
As far as what I'm observing, the Purple is the biggest and definitely king of the tank. It immediately established pecking order with the rest of the Tangs. The Hippo is kind of a doofus, just floats around. It had a minor standoff with the Lavender. The two Acanthurus actually get along the best. The Naso, being the smallest and true to its reputation, does not bother others and others do not bother it. The social order seems to have stabilized and I will be monitoring the situation closely.
Now for the bad. The Lavender has some marks on it. Could just be bruising, it has one spot which does not quite look like ich but it's hard to tell. I saw it's head twich a little a couple times, but I couldn't tell if it was grabbing food. It's the most active one, but it's not swimming against powerheads, or displaying any sort of external parasite behavior. Salgado claims to quarantine their fish at least a week at 2.0-2.25 Copper power. Of course if it's just a week that's not enough. If it's 9 days, that's JUST enough to knock ich off the fish if they did everything perfectly.
Fortunately, I have a plan. I only have a 40 gallon breeder, even if I wanted to quarantine in that, there's no way all those fish would've fit in that. However, it doesn't need to quarantine fish.
When I setup the tank, most of the rock was dry. I have a few pieces of live rock in there, just laying in the sandbed. I purposely did it this way because I don't like glueing live rock. If any signs of illness come up:
- I will manually remove the live rock and put it in the 40. I will also hand remove all the inverts (snails and hermit crabs), as much as I can. Those will also go into the 40.
- Then I will treat the main display with copper as if that were the true "quarantine" tank. The rocks will go fallow in the 40 for 76 days
- Once the main display has been treated for 30-45 days, I will throw in a bunch of cuprisorb. People claim that cuprisorb doesn't work if the copper leaches in the rock, but I'm confident enough time running it will get it to a low enough level.
- Once treatment is done, and 40g fallow is done, put everything back.
The only downside to this approach is losing time for the live rock to seed the main display. But after 30-45 days, and after cuprisorb, I can buy more live rock. This way the fish can be enjoyed in the main display, so there's no rush treating with copper.
