I thought you only treat with meds if you actually see disease on the fish. I will qt for a month.
LESSON LEARNED ABOUT QUARANTINING NEW FISH
- Thread starter platytetrafan
- Start date
Sorry to hijack, but related...I'm doing a fishless cycle and I keep hearing that one of the benefits is I can can stock all at once, but wouldn't that effectively make my big tank the quarantine tank? Although if some fish are healthy and others are sick, I could separate the sick, at the risk of the healthy having already caught it...but I would worry about treating everyone en mass since I know some species (such as kuhli loaches) are a lot more sensitive to meds than others. How does this work?
So...it sounds like I shove them all in a tank together and hope nothing breaks out, and if something does, place the regular fish in my real QT for regular medication dosage, and give lesser dosages to the more sensitive fish in my main tank? Or is there a better way to do this?
Even doing a fishless cycle i still would not be inclined to add a load of fish all at once personally. Even more so, if those fish are likely to be coming from dfferent places. Plus as was said earlier, its easier to treat in a small tank than a big one. And yes some fish are particularly sensitive to treatments.
my recommendation in this situation, is pick the hardiest fish from your list, and add those first.... then, gradually over the course of the next month, add the other species (by QT method) til the tank is stocked.
Am I correct in thinking here that gradual stocking is better as it allows your bacterial colony to gradually increase and keep up with the bioload of the fish, thus avoiding a mini cycle?
This was in regards to a fishless cycle, where enough ammonia is supplied to the tank to allow full stocking once the cycle is complete...at least, that's claimed to be one of the benefits of going fishless. I was confused about that perk and quarantining at the same time 
