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So I have a 38 gallon tank with 7 juvenile african cichlids in it. i have a male kenyi that is about 1.5" long and tonight i just noticed that one of his side fins looks almost like it has fin rot. im not 100% sure, but it looks white and the fins are almost thread-like. Anyway, I think im going to treat him with melafix.

i have never used melafix before, though i have used other medications..one of which permanently damaged one of my tanks by dying the silicone green .

anyway, i was wondering...should i buy a small tank and quarentinne him and treat him with the melafix? or should i just treat the entire 38 gallon tank? would that be bad for the other fish or disrupt the tank's overall health?

~*~ Caviar? no thanks! ~*~

Go for alone, that was you can..
A. Have an extra tank handy
B. Use less meds, for this treatment and otheres to come
C. Sicknesses and Illnesses can't spread
D. You don't have to change any silicone colors

Theres many more, but you get the point .

Hope this helps,

hammy!

The QT is certainly the best way to go now saying that I have never had one in 35+years not that it would have come in handy on a few occasions.
I look at it this way if I have a problem in the large tank I have to treat the whole tank any way. The main benifit is when you are buying new fish.

Have a look in [link=My Profile] http://www.fishprofiles.com/forums/member.aspx?id=1935[/link] for my tank info

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Keith

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Melafix is unlikely to harm fish or the filter , so in that context , it is a med that you can use in community. Its really only tea tree oil, and as long as you do water changes as instructed no harm should come to the fish.

However a whitening of a fin could be bacterial fin rot, saprolegnia or fungus, even columnaris.With saprolegnia and regular finrot I probably wouldnt quarantine, but I would for columnaris.

Melafix really only copes with the bacterial end of finrot, and pimafix copes with the fungal end, so until diagnosis was conclusive id use both in community, rather than just one.They are good meds for early stages of infections, but I dont consider them a substitute for more serious meds against fungus that contain malachite green, or meds against bacteria like furan .Mela and pima are mild treatments that are really intended for community use, if youre gonna use quarantine you would use a more serious medication as there are no tankwide consequences and you might as well wade in strongly. Depends how early you think youve caught the infection.

The thing about whether to quarantine or not depends on whether youve caught things early enough, and what the nature of the disease is. With most finrot causes, its usually time to knock the tank back a little on the harmful bacterial front and do a little extra substrate cleaning, perhaps empty some mulm out of a filter, scrub the odd decoration.So in a sense, quarantine may not be necessary if youre gonna delouse the tank a bit anyway. The converse arguement is when you have a fish so badly infected that it could raise the level of infection in the tank pretty much by itself.Obviously under those circumstances youd go for a quarantine.


I think under most circumstances, if you catch things nice and early, and you have non lethal meds like pimafix and melafix handy, you might as well do a quick tank cleanup, and chuck both in. For most cases that will be perfectly sufficient to sort the problem out, rather than get locked into a situation when one particular fish gets ill, is stressed by moves, and constantly reinfected by reintroductions back into its original tank, which may have a high ambient level of infectious diseases.

If you have a situation where the disease is obviously really infectious to all fish and many are infected, again you might as well treat the whole tank.

Its one of those things, a quarantine is at its most effective when used immediately after purchasing the fish, segregating a sick fish from a community its already been in is often less effective .It protects the other fish, to some degree, but with routine infections where there is a problem with ambient levels of infection, you kind of need to address it in a tankwide context anyway.If you can only get really quite poisonous meds a segregation can be worth it to preserve the filter.

In your case I think cichlids are apt to bite each other occassionally and that means ambient infection could hit any of them, so its important to keep levels down,so I would use mela and pima both as soon as possible and see how it goes. Most african communities are not peaceful, and so there is a necessity to keep on top of necrotising bacteria and fungus that may take advantage of any wound.

You certainly can quarantine this fish, but being a cichlid, if that quarantine isnt cycled, his chances of recovery may decrease in that situation.

I guess decisions on quarantine have to be tailored to the individual.Balance your urge to do a quarantine against your fish disease knowledge.Quarantine is always a hard choice between the needs of the many and the needs of the few.

My personal take on quarantine is that you do it from the beginning when you first acquire fish, as later on it is of less use. I have over 300 fish, and I have had to segregate fish from an already established community in that time, perhaps 5 times in ten years,namely when dealing with diseases like hexamita, mycobacterium, or neon tetra disease. In any other disease circumstance the fish were treated perfectly successfully in situ.

As for meds dyeing silicone green or blue- well, it doesnt even enter into it. You do what you have to do. Whether silicone goes green or not shouldnt be preying on the mind.Better a green stained tank full of live fish, than a clear siliconed tank with fish sporadically kicking the bucket.Presentation should never be allowed to get in the way of an effective cure. Usually wears off in about 6 months or so anyway I can happily look around the room and see 3 huge community aquaria of which two have blue staining and one has green with pride, because the contents of said aquaria are very much alive.