Looking for Indepth Information about Hospital Tanks and more

[1commander]

I am pretty new but doing a lot of research before getting my first large-scale aquarium going.

I have never had experience with fish sickness besides dealing with goldfish in the past. So I am wondering if someone could tell me about 2 things related to fish health:

1) Hospital Tanks - everything you can, a great indepth link would be nice, as I need the basics.
2) Tank Cycling - I am not sure what it's for, but I understand you are supposed to do things to a tank before putting the fish in the them so that they can acclimate better.

Any information pertaining to these two topics and the care of scaleless fish would be great too, as the fish I keep (catfish, eel) are both scaleless and I understand medication and other things can be harsher on them.

Thanks.

 

[guppy]

Hospital tanks are just tanks set aside for quarantine and medicating ill fish, a bare tank of appropriate size with heater, sponge filter, and fresh, clean, dechlorinated water is all you need. Keeping an empty 10g around suffices for most fish up to 8" long.

Cycling a tank is just giving the benificial bacteria in the filter a chance to develope a large enough colony to breakdown the ammonia produsproduced by fish and waste.
Fish and waste produce ammonia which bacteria breakdown to nitrites (less toxic), this is further broken down by more bacteria into nitrates (even less toxic), which is removed with water changes.
While there are several products that speed up the process of establishing your bacterial colony in your filter the best way is the old way. Patience. Add only a couple fish every few days, hardiest ones first. This lets the bacteria catch up naturally.

 

[wataugachicken]

cycling takes usually 6-8 weeks to grow a large enough bacterial colony to support a full bioload. you will need test kits for ammonia, nitrite, nitrate. a pH kit wouldn't be a bad idea either. if you have a petsmart local to you, you cna go online to the petsmart website and print out the price for the API Master Test Kit, then bring the print-out into the store and get it for the online price, which is under $20.

you can do a fish-in or a fishless cycle. fish-in, or fishy, means you add fish and wait for the cycle to begin. you'll have to test the water daily or more, and do water changes as necessary to keep ammonia and nitrite under .25ppm. above .25ppm those chemicals can become harmful to fish, affecting the gills and long-term health. once ammonia and nitrite are 0 and you start to show nitrates, the tank has cycled, and you can add more fish a few at a time, and repeat the process, testing to make sure there are no ammonia or nitrite spikes. after the initial cycling, these "mini-cycles" from increasing the bioload will go faster.
a fishless cycle involves using an empty tank (no live creatures) and a bottle of pure ammonia (no dyes, no surfactants, no frangrances - only water, ammonia, and a chelating ingredient). using the test kits to measure, you add 3-5ppm of ammonia to the tank in order to get the cycle started. you test ammonia every day, and when it starts to drop you add a little bit more to keep it in the 3-5ppm range. 3-5ppm of ammonia gives you a generous amount of bacteria that can feed off of it, and a large buffer when you eventually add fish. once ammonia starts to drop, test nitrites and nitrates. continue the process, adding ammonia when necessary. once the ammonia and nitrite drop down to 0ppm in 24 hours (so you add 5ppm one morning, and the next morning both ammonia and nitrite have been processed into nitrate) the cycle is finished. at that point you should do a few big water changes to get nitrate down below 10ppm. it will be high at the end of the cycle because of all the ammonia that has been added. after the water change, you can add a full stock of fish. if you don't want to add fish right away, just continue to dose ammonia daily until you are ready for fish, and do big water changes again beforehand.
adding filter media or gravel from an established tank will introduce the beneficial bacteria into your system and make it go faster, possibly down to just a couple weeks depending on how much you can get. for example, a handful of gravel might help, but if you could run a filter on someone else's tank for a week and then move it over to yours, you should have a pretty good colony already established in the filter.

 

[Ianab]

Those are 3 valid methods of getting your tank/filter cycled.

As you already have some smaller tanks which must be cycled (your fish are still alive ) then method 3 is a good option. Run an existing tank with 2 filters for a couple of weeks, then move one to the new tank, or move part of the media from a working filter into your new filter.
It wont be enough to support a full load of fish in the new bigger tank, but it will provide enough biological filtering to support a few fish and avoid any big ammonia spike. Let them live there for a couple of weeks while the new filters start to cycle and then just add fish a few at a time over the next month.

Assuming you have a suitable sized filter the bacteria will multiply to match the amount of fish in the tank. If you reduce fish numbers, some bacteria will die off over time, but this isn't a problem. When you increase fish numbers (or they grow bigger) there is more food for the bacteria and they multiply. This doesn't happen overnight though, takes a few days for them to catch up. So allways add fish to a tank a few at a time to avoid an ammonia spike.

It's not as complicated or scary as some people make out, as long as you are aware of what is going on.

Where a disaster can happen is when a newbie buys a new tank, fills it with water and adds a full population of fish. Ammonia builds up faster than the bacteria can multiply, 1/2 the fish die off before things settle down.

Newbie # 2 buys same tank, but is on a budget and only buys 2 fish the first week. They survive and 2 more fish get added next week. After 6 weeks the tank is well stocked and no casualties. They have followed cycling process number 1, even if they didn't realise it

Cheers

Ian

 

[guppy]

Something to rwember is that the term "cycling a tank" is miss leading as it implies that the process is a one time thing. What you are really doing is establishing an ongoing process that continues as long as the tank is running.