I have a small longhorn cow fish coming in the mail today, but I just noticed this spot near the tail of my tang. What is this, and should I quarantine my tang or cow fish? (I didn't intend on quararte the cowfish sense I read it can be more stressful for them and lower their chances of survival)
Help ID on my blue tang.
- Thread starter CasualReefer
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chipmunkofdoom2
Always Making Something
Where did you read this? Quarantining is not inherently stressful. If you put a fish in a QT tank that's too small or don't manage the ammonia and water quality, then yeah, it could be stressful. Read some of Humblefish's good articles on QT. You'll see that QT is little more than a tank, a pump, a heater, a few PVC elbows for shelter and some seeded biological media.
The only way skipping QT works out is if the fish comes in 100% healthy. Those are very long odds, ones that I'm not comfortable taking. If you're on R2R a lot, you usually see a new thread every day on how to treat a sick fish, or how to handle a display tank that became infected by skipping quarantine. There are often more than one of these new threads posted every day.
I would personally never put a fish directly in my tank without quarantining, under any circumstances. Many reefers are comfortable taking the gamble that the fish they bought is 100% healthy. Unfortunately, many of them end up losing their bet.
