Disease pevention
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Quarantine Tank
A quarantine tank should be part of every serious fish lovers equipment. It dosant have to be very large as long as its adequate for the size and number of fish to be observed or treated.
The reason this is to prevent the spread of disease in your main tank and enable easier cheaper treatment.
As a rule fish should be quarantined for a minimun of two weeks.Treating them also as a prevention with a multipurpose medication is a good idea as well while they are in the smaller tank.
After a week start putting some water from your main tank into the quarantine tank to enable them to start acclimatizing to the water conditions.
If the quarantened fish has to be treated for disease it is best to disenfect the tank after recovery. The best thing I find is to scrub with water heaviley concentrated with salt and then left to dry without rinsing to let the salt crust over the glass. Then rinsed off after a day or two.

Keeping equipment cleant
To keep fish healthy and prolong their life,these suggestions should be taken to heart to prevent disease.
1. New arrivals should be quarantened for a mininum of two weeks.
2. Each tank should have its own individual catching net.
3. The use of a bucket with a disenfectant mix to store nets in as well as a sepetate bucket of fresh water to rinse the nets off before use.
Salt can be used to disenfect the nets but take 24 hours to do so. The good thing with salt is that it is safe,cheap and lasts a very long time due to no loss of concentration level.
4. Hands also must be very clean before inserting them in the tank water.Using something like isopropanol is a very effective way to disenfect hands..
5. plants should be bought from a store that doesant keep fish or any other living thing in the same tank as they can harbour parisites etc.
Tey can be disenfected in a litre of water with a table spoon of alum for 5 minutes then rinsed off.
6. Regular water changes help the biological cycle in the tank. Its best to do small frequent chnges as apposed to larger less frequent changes.
7. One of the most impotant things is a test kit that does ammonia,nitrite,nitrate and ph levels.
This will give you early warning of things going wrong. I will talk more about cycling the tank later on and how the new tank syndrome works and how to age your water.
Peventative treatmant with vitamins
The use of vitamins to to prevent diseases such as HITH can be very effective but on the over hand if not carefully dosed can cause symptons of disease and death.
Commercially available preperations for aquarists bind the vitamins to water insoluble powder to prevent loss and bind s to the food untill eaten by the fish.Preperations that disolve in water are not very effective and quickly decompose in the water.
Mix 500mg vitamin powder into 100g feed. this should not be fed to healthy fish more than twice a week but can be given to sick fish four to five times a week.