As someone who is currently setting up this kind of business, I’d like to explain the challenges of quarantining en masse vs. as a hobbyist:
As a hobbyist, I would QT 2-3 fish at a time (usually in a 10 gal). The process was pretty straight forward: Treat for ich/velvet using copper or Chloroquine, deworm with prazi and then move the fish to a larger (29 gallon) observation tank to ensure nothing got missed. If I saw white stringy poo (intestinal worms) or a bacterial infection arose, I could deal with it in the 29 gal. Like you, I wasn’t always successful with QT, but I did pretty well. Worst case scenario... some weird Typhoid Mary disease wiped out everything in QT, I would bleach/sterilize everything and start over with a new batch of fish. But the bottom line is my fish in the DT were always protected from the unknown.
However, when you QT 50-60 fish at a time (like I have been doing) you are much more likely to encounter the following:
As much as I advocate using medications, I do realize they are inherently bad for the fish. Every med you dose into the water your fish’s liver & kidneys has to filter + there are always side effects. So, I had hoped to only use minimal medications on my fish and rely upon observation to determine if additional treatment was required. This approach worked for me in the beginning, but after my recent bout with gram negative bacteria I have come to realize I need to get a lot more aggressive with medicating + food soaking medications. As a MB recently told me, everything that goes wrong on the outside with these fish also goes wrong on the inside.
- Aggressive gram negative bacterial infections, which spread from fish to fish. I recently lost 60% of a wholesale order to this. The growths started out looking like Lymphocystis, but gram staining later confirmed gram negative bacteria. Even worse, the growths spread over the fishes’ internal organs (via necropsy) which explained why just dosing the water with antibiotics didn’t halt the fish deaths.
- I have been encountering praziquantel resistant strains of monogeneans (flukes) and turbellarians (black ich). I never saw this before as a hobbyist. When this happens, I have to treat the entire QT with either hyposalinity or formalin in order to 100% eradicate.
- I currently am using 8-40 breeders and 4-29 gallon aquariums as quarantine tanks. As bacteria spreads & biofilm forms in these QTs, any medications (except copper) I dose become less & less effective due to biodegradation. So periodically I have to completely break down and sterilize each & every QT in order to hit the reset button. (I am currently experimenting with just dosing chlorine in order to accomplish this.) But the cost of reseeding these QTs with nitrifying bacteria is just another expense associated with QTing on a commercial level.
- All of the medications I use are pharmaceutical grade vs. what some aquarium company sells. It’s a lot more expensive to medicate this way, but I can only trust what I know has been tested to be 99% pure or better.
- No words can express my disgust with the sorry state of livestock wholesalers and the aquarium industry as a whole right now. It’s very difficult to QT on a commercial level when you have such a bad starting point to work from.
So, I will keep soldering on, trying to improve my techniques and get ahead of this learning curve. FWIW; this has never been about making money for me. This is about stopping all this indiscriminate loss of fish life, and putting pressure on the industry as a whole to do the same. Wish me luck.
