List of Fish stores that quarantine live stock

[JVU]

Can’t remember the name but there’s a place in LA you can buy completely clean fish that have been through a rigorous QT process. You certainly pay an arm and a leg for it but I’m sure what you want is a specialized place as most LFS just don’t have the labor $$s lying around to maintain such an arduous system.

Maybe you are referring to marinecollectors.com?

I haven’t ordered from them before, but heard they match your description. If anyone else has experience with them I’d be happy to learn from it.

 

[Chromis]

Remove Violet from that list. Violet definitely does not follow a QT process that would result in any guarantee of disease-free fish. The bigger problem might be that the fish at Violet are underfed and severely crowded with dead fish floating around the tank.

 

[Bruce Spiegelman]

Remove Violet from that list. Violet definitely does not follow a QT process that would result in any guarantee of disease-free fish. The bigger problem might be that the fish at Violet are underfed and severely crowded with dead fish floating around the tank.

He was advertising regularly on the BAR facebook page at one point that all fish were quarantined and were disease and parasite free. I asked him multiple times what his QT procedure was, and he flat out refused to tell me other than it only took 48 hours, and always resulted in pest free fish .....

I told him to stop posting they were QT'nd, and he hasn't posted since, but many of his customers are told he does.

 

[MichaelW]

Hi folks, Michael here from Bay Bridge Aquarium. Just wanted to chime in and share some details about what I'm doing here.

We absolutely do quarantine and treat every fish here. Some people have been skeptical about whether we really were doing so, but I've now been doing tours of the QT system and have photos to share; it's kept in the back of the store away from normal viewing because of the risk of cross contamination and for the physical space needs. I'm probably over $75k in at this point just building the QT, dealing with growing pains, labor time, materials, trial and error, failures, livestock loss. Some people think this is easy but it really is not anywhere close, and no matter what, no process will ever, ever be 100%.

Our system consists of individually plumbed compartments/tanks/chambers each drained and plumbed one by one, and sterilized with massive amounts of ozone and UV and then recirculated. We just recently upgraded the capacity in a big way. I'm happy to spend hours talking about it as this has been my passion for a long time. I have tested the system and I can put fish with visible ich in one compartment, and without any medications at all, it goes away and does not spread - this is basically tank transfer method on steroids. Nevertheless, I still use medication as a precaution.

Depending on the source of the fish and how it was shipped, and the bag pH, I acclimate carefully at matching (~low pH )to diffuse ammonia out of the tissue, and waste lots of saltwater, and then use ciprofloxacin, methylene blue liberally. I buy kilograms at a time of chloroquine phosphate, metronidazole, praziquantel, levamisole, and other meds. The UV breaks down CP and I have a spectophotometer to measure the amount in the water, which I tend to keep on the low side, depending on the load and what I'm keeping, I vary it because it does kill some anthias and wrasses. Sometimes I've used copper and prefer not to, it's really not good for the fish. That's tempered as I use CP medicated food; I have a recently updated recipe using sodium alginate as a superior binding agent (and happy to share or provide).

There is no set time frame on the fish QT. They are ready when they are ready and I don't rush it. I just recently started doing and getting more familiar with gill, fin and skin/scrape microscopy and am checking all the fish in the microscope before calling them ready. The results have been rather surprising - I am still finding signs of some TBD pathogens despite fish long being healthy and showing no visible signs. It's a separate discussion on how sterile a fish is expected to be before you can call it "ready" and whether it may even hurt at some point, depending on the sterility of the target tank it's going to. If you remove all fish immunity to ich completely, for example, (which it sees constantly in the ocean) and hold it a while, and then put it in a system with a subacute ich infection, it's going to act as a carrier and could make the tank break out.

We've long been doing special orders on fish and getting them to customers when they are ready - so things may not always be visible out on the show floor. When fish are done, they are moved over to the retail side; there is more UV over there, and they also get medicated food. I have seen some ich once or twice sneak through a while back, but that has not happened for a long time and we do our absolute best to make sure it won't ever happen again. Again though, there is absolutely no process that is fool proof, and nobody should ever tell you that there is. You can not tell a fish is healthy by looking at it!

We are on the HumbleFish forum, an excellent treatment and disease resource site (http://humble.fish), as a fully vetted vendor that offers QT and treated fish for sale, and will also hold them for as long as you want, and group together your fish, etc.

I'm currently working on some reef safe truly effective ich, velvet, and uronema treatment protocols with my own pelleted and/or frozen foods, using investigational drugs like niclosamide, L-DOPA, EGCG, various polyphenols, and more, and hope to one day offer PCR detection services to test your sand, water, and fish samples for Crypto, Oodinium, Brook, and Uronema. We may charge a little bit more for fish but your support goes a long way... Always happy to answer anyone's questions about fish disease and treatments and however I can help.

Thanks,
Michael