Chapter 1 - Discus Keeping theory
Chapter 3 - Tank size and Filtration
Chapter 6 - Quarantine
Quarantine and discus keeping come hand in hand. One without the other is unthinkably risky. Adding new fish should always start with 4-6 week quarantine of the new fish, allowing them to acclimatize to your water parameters, food, and general environment. More importantly it allows you to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases that the may fish carry to your existing healthy stock. Having a quarantine tank makes water changes easier, medication dosages easy to calculate and administer and generally allows you to keep things sterile and clean to give them the best possible chance to recover and gather back their strength after long travel (mail order fish) or extreme changes in water parameters etc. Even apparently healthy fish can carry a load of parasites and diseases that will only become evident when introducing them to a healthy stock of fish, with the newly added fish not showing any symptoms at all because they have built up an immunity to these diseases over time.
4-6 weeks is a good length of time and common parasites and diseases will show their symptoms within this time as most of their lifecycles are short and many lifecycles turn around during this 4-6 week period. This increases the chances of you spotting problems that take time to manifest itself. The more time you can afford to quarantine the better. For my set up they will be moved from quarantine after about 8 weeks into a grow out tank where they will be raised to adulthood. This effectively is a long term quarantine. A further precautionary measure can be done to ensure that there are no surprise infections that these new fish will carry to the healthy old stock, and that is to add a cull or a runt from your old tank to the tank fish that just finished quarantine. This allows you to see if the new fish transmits anything to the healthy fish or visa versa. Better to risk one fish than to risk your whole stock of healthy fish. In the case that you want to transfer them over to the show tank as soon as possible, or you have purchased wild caught fish then you can use preventative medication to curb the chance of problems occurring. However by far the best way is to just give them a stress free environment, plenty of good clean water, highly nutritious food and most of all a lot of time.
Once you have acquired your fish and they have arrived home you can begin to acclimate them into your quarantine tank. Assuming that a quarantine tank has been completely set up with matured filters, adequate subtle lighting and correct temperatures which should be a few degrees higher than the normal temperatures, especially if you have acquired juveniles. Turn the lights off in the quarantine tank. Set up a clean bucket and gently pour all the fish or perhaps maximum 4-6 fish per 10 liter bucket, making sure that there is enough water there to allow the fish to swim upright and have an extra 1 inch of water more than their total height. Aerate the water with an air stone and pump, and install a spare small 50W heater set to the same temperature as your quarantine tank. Now using a spare 5mm air hose, start by siphoning the water from your quarantine tank into the bucket. This should take you at least 10 -15 mins to fill the bucket, making sure you watch the fish careful for problems that need immediate attention. Once this period is over and a quick temperature check using a spare thermometer is done, you can start netting the fish one by one into the quarantine tank. Once all are in, keep the lights off and leave them to recover for 24 hours with the lights off. You can do a brief visually check of each fish for any signs or problems that require attention immediately.
If there are fish that do have problems such as cuts, fin rot, ich and other visibly apparent problems, add 1 teaspoon of salt and one drop of malachite green per 10 gal of water. The temperature should be set around the 84-86 degrees F or 31-32 degrees C for a few days or until the problems start to clear. Don't forget to replace the salt and Malachite Green with every water change.
After 24 hours, turn the lights on and begin with the first feeding of freeze dried blood worms or live black worms. Even the most picky eaters won't be able to turn down juicy blood worms and they should be given a generous helping. At this time you may find that some fish may not eat. Watch carefully as some fish that are sick or aren't acclimatizing very well may peck at a piece of food and spit it back out again or just downright refuse it altogether. Healthy fish should be very hungry at this stage and get very excited over food, especially after a 24 hour or more absence of it. If things are ok, you can begin to ween them onto beef heart and dry foods as well by mixing worms into beef heart or dry foods. Over time they will be used to beef heart if they are not accepting from the onset. See the Feeding Discus section for more information on foods.
Sick fish
For the problematic fish that are not eating, give them a few days to settle down, if they have not improved and the fish are not looking very well at all, are dark in colour, hide a lot even during meal time, head stand or tail stand, lying on their side or other strong signs of distress then first and foremost you should suspect your water parameters. Test for Ammonia, PH (making sure that the PH difference between the quarantine tank and the breeders/lfs tanks are not too vastly different, perhaps no more than half to 1 degree of PH), Nitrates, Nitrites, temperature, make sure there is no un-neutralized chlorine or chloramines when you are doing water changes, general hardness and carbonic hardness, making sure they are all within acceptable limits. If everything checks out ok try doing a large 50% water change and check to see if things pick up after a few feedings. If they the problematic fish are not showing any signs of improvement or if symptoms are actually getting worst such as showing disease symptoms such as stringy white faeces or holes or patched on the head or lateral line, you can then decide to take a active approach to quarantine by using medication.
Take note that certain medications can and do stress out fish to a certain degree and many fish given good clean water will recover and fight back against all odds. Just note that all medications are very strong and instructions and dosage rates should be followed as accurately as possible. Avoid at all cost the chance that your fish will die from intoxication from improper dosage of medications by researching the dosage rates and methodology of administering medications. For a start a great medication article exists at the Discus Resource Page (http://home.earthlink.net/~grenier2/discus.htm) which has come in very handy for me, and has saved me and my fish many times.
In closing, remember that time is your best weapon when it comes to quarantine. The more time you give your fish the better. That coupled with stable, clean water and you should not run into any problems. If you do encounter problems stay calm and make a cool calm judgment of what to do next. Most problems are not life threatening and won’t cause problems right away allowing you ample time to monitor the situation and ask for help from experts. The worst thing that you can do is jump to conclusions and administer the wrong treatment for the sick fish, elevating the problem original problem even more.