Length of quarantine when tank already has ich

[Nyankee]

Hello. We'll immense to the hobby and have already lost a lot of money with new fish. I suppose my new fish died bc I did no acclimation and no quarantine. Somehow I also managed to introduce ich into my display tank.

The amazing thing is that the fish that were in tank before ich started to show up have been healthy and avoided ich. 8 have several cardinal, three tangs, two clowns, hawk fish, and few others. when ich started to appear, some of the existing fish had a few spots of ich and scratched on the rocks, and some he cloudy eyes, however they all got better and now are ich free. The problem was every new fish I would add to the tank would get ich and die.

I just set up a quarantine tank and managed to save and treat my new purple tang. The tang has been in there for 9 days and all the spots have disappeared.

We'll now to the real question of this thread. I was thinking, if it was worth keeping my purple tang in the hospital tank for a full three weeks. My tank already has ich and I don't have time any time soon to move the fish and let the ich die off. I assume that since the purple tang has survived the ich, it should do a lot better in the display tank against the ich. I woukd make sense if the display tank was ich free and I never introduced the tang to the display tank. I also want to know if 10 days is also good enough to quarantine new fish, considering my tank already ja some ich. This way I kill off any other parasite that's deadlier than ich. Right now I am using paraguard to treat my purple tang.

 

[pisanoal]

10 days is next to worthless for quarantine. You will not consistently kill any parasite in that short amount of time. I don't believe paragaurd is considered effective against velvet or brook which could both present after longer then 10 days.

Also, just because you don't see white spots does not mean ich is gone. It can live in the gills and some spots may not be visibly. Most could have also fallen off to move on to the cyst stage.

 

[Nyankee]

What if I start using copper for quarantine?

 

[Breakthecycle2]

What if I start using copper for quarantine?

You will need to, but minimum QT period should be 6 weeks. 30 days of copper, two week observation period. What concerns me is you say you lost a lot of fish because of not acclimating or QT'ing. You should do as much reading as possible and ask any many questions as you can before buying new fish or taking any fish out of QT.