Please make up my mind- quarantine a new mandarin or no?

SueAbu · May 15, 2024

I am OVERRUN with amphipods, so I ordered a green mandarin from Pet...C, online, never saw the nasty lfs system. I have a reef mostly tank with a watchman goby and an orange dotyback (who was originally supposed to take care of the critter problem, but got lazy with all the food falling on his head). Quarantine the little guy? Or no?
If yes, do it with a treatment of some kind? (If yes, all I have to do is put one of my infested live rocks in the qt and he'll be fed)

Anthonykp17 · May 15, 2024

You only have 2 other fish in your tank - go ahead and put the little guy in

Problem with qt mandarin fish is they dont handle medication well and in bare qt tanks unless ur willing to spend a ton on adding pods they little guy is going to starve to death -

Biokabe · May 15, 2024

Agreed.

QT'ing and treating fish for potential diseases is not as benign as people want to make it out to be. It's like chemo; it's stressful for the fish, but worse on the diseases and parasites. So the decision to quarantine a fish assumes that the fish is hardy enough to survive the treatments we subject them to. Many of the more delicate fish can't survive QT except in absolutely perfect conditions.

Mandarins are one such fish. They're already fairly delicate, but then you have to consider the difficulty of feeding them - especially since their obligatory food source (live pods) is actively killed by one the most common treatment methods (copper).

Some people can likely get a mandarin through QT, but I personally wouldn't try.

Then again, I personally don't QT, so that last statement doesn't mean much... but if I did QT, I still wouldn't with a mandarin.

dwest · May 15, 2024

I would get some pods, put them in a 10 gallon tank with a piece of rock and isolate the new fish for a month or so. You can feed very small pellets as well. Why not inspect for a disease just in case?

The flip side