This thread helps new reefs run without fallow or qt pls post

[brandon429]

How to run your new tank without fallow and quarantine, post here for guidance live time, we track your tank out to eight months

So as a part of another post it was suggested that I set up a post for the 'alternate' methods. Gonna tag in @Paul B because he follows this path also and his experience is different from mine. How I 'manage' ... read ignore fish disease. My experience. I will put this out there because I...

www.reef2reef.com

Please post new or current reefs there for disease control arrangement help

They use methods that don't include fallow or qt. We are trying to reduce fish disease rates without meds and stress etc

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

I have to go on record that I don’t suggest this course for the vast majority of home aquarists! Proactive treatments are the best way to deal with fish arriving with multiple disease issues.
Jay

 

[brandon429]

Me as well, fallow and qt provide the highest retention rates the hobby has so far


agreed based on post patterns not that I own any marine fish... When I cycle a new keepers reef in message, theyre pointed to this forum and the stickies to see what’s top fish retention info.

there is a very strong undercurrent in the hobby of pro aquarists who disagree on all aspects of fallow and qt, but have no work threads to be able to establish their practices, all the focus is their own reef. Practice time ~

Pauls thread in the general forum is 131 pages of no quarantine no fallow posts, but no new threads as a real test, we can get that here.

I figure it will take about three months to see if no qt, no fallow works as well as current methods. If it does, we’ve got some new info


if it doesn’t, then we will know it only works in ocean-sourced setups if at all.

 

[brandon429]

The Other Way to Run a Reef Tank (no Quarantine)

The other way to run a reef tank (No Quarantine) I was asked by my friend Humblefish to start a thread on my practices of running a tank with no quarantine, hospital tanks, medications, dipping or almost anything else. It is "not" just to take a fish from a store and drop it in your reef...

www.reef2reef.com

see how 132 pages is all pro skipping fallow and qt, no dissenters

they need a balanced test, meaning any other reef other than the authors reef.

 

[mickeysreef <*))))<]

as a thought experiment, i believe no fallow no qt can work. probably what this means is that you may lose some or all your fish, but eventually you will be able to have a tank of fish. now even paul should admit in his early days of reefing back in the 70s he lost fish. so thats the model, add fish until you have a group that will live. never breakdown your tank, continue to add corals until they live, continue to add biodiversity until it lives. nobody will deny that they couldnt keep corals in the 70s. if you had it a week, it was a success.

logically this works. in fact in real application this works because my first tank was no qt or fallow. yes i lost fish - but everything was fine until i hit that tipping point or was it that i added the wrong fish. i could have licked my wounds and simply just pulled the sick fish and continued. really everybody else was fine. this was the point were i began to question if i was doing things correctly. not for myself of course, i was fine. maybe a bit emotionally damaged because i was somehow involved in the death of a pet. but really did i do everything in my power to make sure this fish had the best chance of surviving. the answer to this question must be no. no not because the fish died but no because i failed to take even the minimum precaution against disease.

well thats the rub, today its considered unethical to do this because we have a best practice of qt etc. the counter argument is that a lot of fish die in qt. this is also true because many people attempting qt are new at it and dont know what they are doing. so to fairly look at qt and fallow practices, we need to look at a professional like a marine biologist in the aquaria setting. the counter argument is that 99% of the hobbyist and incidentally the same group that are losing fish in qt arent marine biologist.

this also opens up the argument that people want easy and fast, yep thats also true. its part of human nature. i dont have all day to go on about this, but i do give credit to paul and others like him (he is not the only one -many people have older tanks in the same fashion) on his and their tanks. probably without people like paul, the hobby would not even exist today.

that said, we face a new host of problems today (some may not be so new, but maybe they are new in a new type of way). bad supply lines, misinformation, inexperience, mass supply and demand, greed...

to sum it up, yes no fallow no qt will work. you may lose some fish along the way, you may lose some corals along the way, you will not be able to keep sensitive species like powder blue tangs (immediately or maybe ever). and understand that you are starting in 1970 not 2021, so dont expect results like you might see on a developed mature tank.

 

[brandon429]

heres how I think we can position getting entrants without telling them to take obvious risks by doing opposite of the stickies at the top: someone reading has already skipped fallow and qt anyway, the reef is running right now like that and you haven’t lost a fish, yet. I’ll bet 75% of eyes on this thread are reefing this way, right now.


post thst reef up, these folks in the thread will state how to arrange the tank to keep that condition vs neo, brook, velvet or crypto wipeout by July.

 

[mickeysreef <*))))<]

experiment already done and proven. visit any facebook saltwater aquarium community page. you will find this happening multiple times a week or even possibly a day. this is proven thousands of times over to the tune of who knows how much money (millions) and dead fish (tens, hundreds of thousands if not millions).

 

[brandon429]

how do you mean, qt or no qt?

 

[brandon429]

if you meant no fallow works, then that's what we debate and we need new entrants to prove it

using already existing tanks, no way to watch the maturation phase doesn't help prove anything. taking the myriad posts here in this forum and showing them a non medication way would be outstanding. can't use prior examples, get new ones.

 

[hds4216]

There's not really skill here imo - it's just like playing Russian roulette. Some get lucky, some don't. Eventually, as the number of fish you don't QT goes up, more and more people's luck will run out.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

I will bite. I havn't QT or fallowed but have pulled fish into a QT to treat for an illnesses.

I do think its a bit silly that the standard is to assume that people have enough room in the house for a dedicated QT setup, the patience to do fallow periods and the money to buy additional testing equipment, pumps, heaters ect. Its largely not practical for most people and impossible for anyone living in smaller apartments.

I know the risk I put my tank at by now prophylactically treating and would love to QT my fish once I get a tank sized where it would make sense to reduce the probability of a large die off event. I have three fish in my Evo which costed me around $100 total. A QT setup, hanna checker, additional salt, filters and heaters is easily $250 and requires that I have the space for an additional tank and the time to do the additional maintenance and checks.

If you have the space and funds to ensure your $10K worth of fish don't get velvet and die all at once, please do so. For now I will be giving them tons of fresh and frozen foods, closely observing for signs of stress and enjoying the additional free time.

I also think that copper resistant ich/velvet is only a matter of time but obviously nothing to back that up.

 

[brandon429]

this is why I like basing all claims in reefing on work threads and specifically not anything else including peer reviewed articles and for sure not awesome single example reefs


we want to know what runs the ten thousand


what can be shown or not shown in work threads is the heart of discovery. It’s safe and insulating to make claims without thirty reefs directly handy this last year for proofs

for example, if someone wants to move tanks or move homes we have a guaranteed method that will skip cycles and work every time. zero loss, total compliance. Any reef.

if someone wants to know how to swap out a sandbed or remove one altogether, we have fifty pages of that on file most recent job last week


that’s the bar I’m expecting from no quarantine crew and I’d add this: take any given decade in reefing and a new method exists. Few of them remain decade after decade, new discoveries get made. So if Mickeysreef has ways that bring on more natural balance and less medication it needs to be weighed and given honest eval, it could be a coming new yet older approach. Let the record reflect there’s a huge massive proof gradient to the contrary but hey don’t all good discoveries get made in that gradient, it’s only fun if everyone initially disbelieves you.


I remember starkly a time in reefing no tank under ten gallons was possible, they’d all die or are cheat plumbed to hidden reservoirs

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

What is your criteria for success? Disease related crashes are usually triggered by an event that may only happen once in 5 years. QT vs not cannot be compared because the time frames and individual events that lead up to the crash occur over 6 months to a year.

I have lost 1 fish to disease and it died within 72 hours of shipping. With the QT vs not its not as cut and dry as a tank move thread. If a tank move, rip clean or skip cycle does fail, everything dies and the case is closed as a bad idea. With QT vs not the failure is lying in wait and not as definitive as a crash 12 hours after putting the tank back together.

 

[hds4216]

for example, if someone wants to move tanks or move homes we have a guaranteed method that will skip cycles and work every time. zero loss, total compliance. Any reef.

that’s the bar I’m expecting from no quarantine crew

Really not sure this bar is possible. Things like velvet are so deadly and fast acting that their accidental introduction can spell doom no matter how healthy the fish.

 

[Jekyl]

I followed Paul's setup as best I could starting out. RUGF system, no sump, skimmer and a HoB filter for different media or just floss. I alternate through as many different kinds of frozen or live food I can get. I also purchased live rock or substrate from as many LFS as I could. Probably 4 or 5 different locations. I have never quarantined. I currently have 8 fish and a few different coral. Only lost 1 fish so far to suicide (jumped out). My tank is coming up on 2 years old currently. Still a short sample size but working for me. Rather than try to keep everything out of my system I've introduced everything I can get my hands on.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

I literally walked out to collect mud one day at the beach. Probably a bad move but I was ambitious to dirty my tank up with biodiversity lol

 

[Jekyl]

I literally walked out to collect mud one day at the beach. Probably a bad move but I was ambitious to dirty my tank up with biodiversity lol

If I lived by the ocean my tank would be like a petrie dish

 

[brandon429]

makes sense H

we'll have to close the gap as much as possible but not to that degree of repeatability, rather large scope problem. nice call.

 

[LRT]

Very interesting and something I haven't thought of until this was posted.
Knock on wood I have never had to deal with disease or lost a fish in my system due to disease.
Luck? Maybe but I try to pick them unblemished, healthy and active when I get them.
Could possibly have something to do with the 300lbs of live rock I have in my 140 gallon total system. 200lbs of that rock was harvested from area I was told that had 18-25 years growth on it.
I have a powder brown that I feel I acquired with brain damage. Its nuts and bounces off rocks sometimes and has ended up with abrasions and cuts from time to time. As much as the cuts stressed me out they heal up pretty quickly and both tangs remain super healthy and disease free.

 

[brandon429]

in my opinion that's the artistic tough to pinpoint outcome but I know exactly what you are describing. my lfs had one that ran golden for twenty years like this above, simply sat there reefing fine no calcium reactors or anything fancy, sps galore and huge basketball sized frogspawns

but its hard to recreate for the up and coming artists lots of intuit gives that skill, they need lists.

whats missing is the repeatability. Your post made me think of something

live rock keeps being a recurring theme in the non qt tanks for understandable reasoning it seems

it would be neat to hit up my list of live rock skip cyclers, whom we paraded the ability to instantly carry fish, for info on fish disease.

this is a fair repository below of folks who used quick cycling to for sure skip fallow and qt:

A thread tracking pure skip cycle instant reefs, no bottle bac

This is a testless cycling thread, we don't want ammonia testing here for any job if possible, because we are teaching reefers/readers that moving live rocks system to system does not restart the cycle: many in our community don't understand that rule and feel that any tank being setup simply...

www.reef2reef.com

hey are your fish dead/decent start to a poll reach out