Transfer Method

[Capt. Nemo]

Incase anyone missed this at the New Hobby forum. I just wanted to share this post by cayars and bring awareness to others of this method of disease control/prevention.

cayars
Registered Member

Registered: Oct 2006
Location: Southern New Jersey
Occupation:
Posts: 143


Setup 2 QT tanks. Every 2 days move the fish from one tank to the next and then clean & air dry the now empty tank and filter. Do this transfer 4 times (8 days) and you will break the ich cycle if it's present on the fish.

If you can let the empty tank sit one day to dry out after cleaning with fresh tap water and then fill back up with salt water. Obviously make sure temp, PH and salinity match on both tanks before transferring the fish so you don't stress them out.

If you do the above your fish will have nice clean water during QT and you really have no worries about ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, phosphates, etc as they get new water every other day.

The life cycle of ich is that the parasite will drop off the fish with 7 days and then will need 3 days before it re-attaches to the fish. By switching every two days it will be impossible for the parasite to attach to the fish and by doing 4 tank transfers the parasite will have fallen off the fish.

No hypo or copper needed this way.

Hobby Experience: 120gal with 200lbs LR, 160lbs LS DSB, 2 - 175 watt HQI 20K, 2 - 95 watt Actenic, 2 - 65 watt 10K PC, 2 - 65 watt Actenic
Current Tanks: 6 power heads, Refugium, Nitrate Reactor, Phosphate Reactor, monster sized AquaticLifeSystems Protein Skimmer, 36

 

[JHemdal]

Wow! Is that method still around? The Shedd Aquarium used that back in the early 1980's. Good theory, but it doesn't take into consideration the active tomites on the fish's body itself, nor the ongoing stress in moving the fish every two days. The Shedd eventually began dosing the fish with sodium chlorite (which also kills the beneficial bacteria) so they needed to bounce back and forth like that to keep the ammonia down. That method worked a little better because the tomites on the fish themselves were killed.

Here are the drawbacks to this method:

1) Each time you capture a fish, you do some minor damage. This adds up over time. Dislodged scales, tiny tears in the fins, etc.

2) If the fish is newly purchased, it never gets a chance to undo the stress of transport. Each new capture causes a bit more stress.

3) Uronema, a very nasty non-obligate protozoan pest is totally unaffected by this.

4) As mentioned, in the case of any active outbreak, enough tomites are on the fish's skin to keep the infection going.

5) The length of time is the bare minimum to break the life cycle of Cryptocaryon, and does not take into account the resting stage.

6) With a small 20 gallon Q tank, the water usage would be on the order of 100 gallons, say $25.

I would proceed cautiously, if at all with this method. I recently tried a "triage" method to control flukes - hit the fish with meds when the first arrive, and then after three days, move them to a more stable Q tank. Had much higher mortality due to the "double bounce" of moving the new fish twice like that.


Jay Hemdal

 

[goldmaniac]

Anyone else use this method with success?

I'm focused on eliminating ich, nothing else...

I've seen no other "2-day" transfer method info. eveything else I've read was 3-day, taking 21 days or longer.

thanks -

E.G.

 

[danorth]

I do something similar. I copper the fish, then once clean to the naked eye and all of the ich is off I use a container to safely move it to a bucket with the live rock I use as the bio filter. Then I drain and clean out the tank and filtration, refill with non-copper water and move the fish back in. I rinse the live rock off in clean salt water as well and move back in. Seems to shrink the process down to 10 days or so. Infact I am at the drain and rinse stage with a small angelfish today. I'll report back how it goes.

 

[goldmaniac]

so you're not doing the transfer method, you're doing a one-time drain, clean, rinse the rock, and replace? after a copper treatment?

interesting.

I'm specifically interested in this 2-day method, as the original poster said that keeping the fish moving from one tank to another every 2 days, as opposed to every three days, doesn't allow ich to reattach.

Simply put, transferring every 2 days doesn't give any cysts enough time to fall off and then reattach, only to fall off.

it alludes that keeping the fish in the same tank for 3 days gives the cysts enough time to reattach to the fish after falling off.

i don't know. I went ahead and transferred three fish in QT last night after reading this, after having in 1st QT for 48 hours. looking for more confirmation that this does work.

IF cysts need 72 hours to reattach, this method keeps the fish moving on to the next tank before ich can reattach. IF.

 

[danorth]

I actually drain and replace about every 4 days, and will do so about 3 times during the QT process.

I'm too chicken to let fish sit with ich (bad case of it that is) on them for 2 days w/o doing anything to help. Perhaps I will follow this method 100% next time and see how it goes. I only see that water is still followed into the new tank from the old tank, fish aren't dry and they are always spitting out water even if you net them. That small amount should still have ich in it. One stage or another. There is a thread from a big aquarium curator and he speaks of how easy one drop can spread ich.

 

[goldmaniac]

yes, I agree with the futility of trying to keep a display tank free of ich.

I had a big ich genocide around June 2008. After that, i was down to 2 fish in my 120 gal, so after the Summer, I disassembled my tank in order to catch the final two fish and put them in QT.

I let my tank go empty for about 4 months, just because Life had other costs before more fish.

So i thought that as long as the Display is now ich-free, i'll try to keep it that way. this is where i am now. i'm not sure that the extra cost and time and stress (fish and myself) is worth it, but i figure that i won't have this oppurtunity again to keep the tank ich-free.

I am now using multiple sets of thermometers, heaters, buckets, tubing, filters, and pumps to keep the water separate. Ridiculous.

But if I don't screw up and I do keep the DT ich-free, and this 2-day transfer method works, this may have some really positive results.

I'm going to screw up and put a wet hand from a non-clean QT tank into my display tank and infect it again sometime, i just know it. Probably that or tubing that isn't completely dry.

 

[danorth]

You are as paranoid as I am......glad to hear it! If I sprinkle pellets into the qt under the water's surface, I go and wash my hand before reaching back into the pellet container to feed my other tanks.

I even have a lid on my topoff water bucket because it sits next to the QT under my main tank. Don't want a fish splash to send water into the bucket and then get pumped in. Even though it is fresh water and the ich would sit for days potentially.....crazy.

 

[francis1123]

i run 3 systems, hospital, isolation, and main. each system has it's own nets, food, tools, scrapers, etc. to prevent any type of cross contamination. i lost nearly all my fish a few months back, i'm VERY paranoid!

 

[goldmaniac]

Same with me. I've always dealt with ich for about 8 years, never had a fatality before last year's Mass Extinction.

I always touted adding crushed, raw garlic to the display tank daily for a week or two and fish always recovered.

I think that they always recovered, anyway, except for the last time.

Drs F+S shipment came in with ich, and that strain is what killed off almost everything. I had to learn the hard way that i should at least TRY to qt everything of ich.

 

[francis1123]

my wipe out was from velvet. $2k in fish down the toilet in a 2 week time frame. that right there will get you QTing no matter what.

 

[goldmaniac]

wow. haven't experienced velvet yet. YET

 

[danorth]

I have and it was more of a 24 hour death wave. Was before I knew of acriflavine.

 

[1geo]

As much as I hate to, I agree with Jay and for the reasons he stated that this method will probably not work; even for Ich alone. Your best bet for Ich is a full blown copper treatment. There are other chemicals you can use for Ich that take less time then copper such as Formalin baths which takes 10 days. Having said that, I would still put the fish in a copper tank for 4 weeks.

 

[goldmaniac]

even copper a 3" hippo tang? those things are more tempermental than my mother-in-law

but I was looking for doubters on this 2-day method, and this is the imput I was looking for. I was hopeful and also doubtful.

Now I have a 2nd opinion confirming my suspicions that 2-day transfer was too easy. That's a confirmation and enough for me to go back to trying copper.

thanks,

E.G.

 

[francis1123]

not to keep this off topic, buti use QuickCure. it is formaline and malachite green. i do the daily dose, 24hrs, 25% water change, dose again. this is a 7 day treatment in a hospital tank. i just took a friends powder blue tang on deaths door and got it ich free and eating with this treatment. it was what finally started saving my fish from the velvet, and it will be my standard treatment for disease from now on.
edit: on a side note with the velvet treatment, the fish that made it through were a copperband butterfly and a hippo tang. probably my 2 most delicate fish, so i have a lot of faith that it doesn't stress them too much.

 

[lesleybird]

Hi, I have used the two day transfer method with success several times in the past but it was very expensive and time consuming. I had two rubbermaid tubs that were about thirty gallons each. I would fill them with twenty gallons of saltwater. Each tub had it's own powerhead, heater and set of PVC tunnels. When I would transfer each fish out I would catch them in a small plastic bucket and then aclimate them with water from the new tub. Would then catch them with my hands and put them into the new tub. I would also take a clean net and remove any uneaten food as there was no biofiltration. I would also add some Aquemel Plus and change them over ever 2 days. I did this for 12 days. It was very time consuming but it works. It also costs lots of money in salt. I would also place the power heads and PVC in hot water in the sink for an hour or so before letting them dry.

I now set up a 45 gallon quarenteen and have is cycled and am using Cupermarine and so far it has not killed off the biofilter. I would only use the transfer method if you did not have a quarenteen set up and cycled as it takes too much work. I would guess that you could use the Cupermarine plus the transfer method to be extra safe to kill all the ich. Good luck, Lesley

 

[goldmaniac]

It is good to hear that this method has proven successful for some, but as LesleyBird just said, a Copper quarantine may be more gentle on the fish. I started a copper treatment last night, first dosing on three fish.

After catching and putting the fish into a new qt tank, after 2 days, the hippo tang has a cloudy eye. I think the stress was just too much for him. I'm going to keep him in a 29 gal qt tank I have and just feed and keep things quiet, hopefully today while I'm at work the Cu will kill off anything that may have gotten a hold during these past 72 hours.

thanks everyone, I'm still interested in hearing more about this 2-day treatment, as it seems to be the quickest solution.

Anytime I qt a tang, they get MAJOR hlle/lateral line disease. I ran hypo last time on a chocolate mimic tang, and in the 8 weeks i had him in qt (6 weeks hypo plus 2 weeks to adjust the salinity down, and also back up) he went from all yellow to brown, and his face is all blotchy like hlle. fed him spirulina and nori and flake during this time.

\ looking to minimize qt time, but healthy specimens in DT is priority, after overall health of the fish.