Quarantine for Plants?

[MandaMunky]

Hey everyone!!

Sorry to have two topics going at once, but I feel like they're pretty different & deserve their own threads. Thanks in advance to anyone who responds - I appreciate the help & difference accounts based on experience a great deal. I really love my fish!

So, I used to have a huge lush planted tank with some amazing fancy goldfish who I loved dearly... they're like these friendly, happy, little puppy dogs of the aquarium. Anyway, I bought a moss ball from a local specialty fish store (privately owned, not a chain) & plopped it in my tank... 5 days later my fish were inundated with ICK! Turns out he had loaches in his plant tank & it was filled with ICK. It killed his whole tank & my whole tank despite my best efforts at rapid treatment - he never even treated his fish because he said they were just "stressed" guy is a MORON & I NEVER will go back to him. After that I cried for 2 weeks & my tank sat empty for months. My husband finally talked me into going to get more fish, but I said never goldfish & never a planted tank EVER again!! He agreed & said lets get a tropical tank going with synthetic plants - so I agreed because tropical fish don't have personalities (or so I THOUGHT) & we'll never have to deal with the plant issue again.

Well, this is also when the big box fish store talked me into my little baby loaches, who were "are very easy to keep & don't require anything special." Obviously, I've learned my lesson there & I did lose one of my little babies to skinny disease, but since finding this forum I've been very successful & my loaches are happy & healthy. I really would love to enrich their environment with some plants, but I don't know hoe to go about this without introducing something bad into the tank. I would like to get some mosses (to help reduce the pH naturally) & also something for them & my pleco to munch on if they so choose.

Any advice is paramount to my moving forward with this... I absolutely WILL NOT do it unless I know I can do it safely. Watching my goldfish perish & having ultimately to euthanize them one by one is something I'll never forget or fully recover from.

Thanks,
Amanda =)

[Diana]

Safe sources for plants:

Join a local aquarium club. Much more responsible than stores!

Buy plants that have been raised in a sterile environment. I know Pet Smart is doing this. Plants are sold in individual sealed containers. They have never been exposed to an aquarium.

Buy plants from tanks that have no fish, and are not on a connected filter with any other tanks. (Yes, there are stores that do this).

Quarantine the plants, and dip them, depending on what you suspect they have been exposed to.

Ich: cannot live without a host. Ich falls off the fish, lands on a plant or the bottom of the tank and releases babies. Those babies must find a host within 24-48 hours at tropical temperatures, or else the Ich dies. The Ich your Goldfish got could have been introduced this way. One adult can produce hundreds of babies.

Most other parasites enter a resting stage, or go dormant, or exist as an egg or something. They can survive a lot longer without a host, you need to actually kill it without killing the plant.
Fish diseases can be spread by sharing the water from an infected tank.

Here is what I would do:
1) Throw away all the water.
2) Rinse the plants in tap water, no dechlor, and carefully separate each stem and look for snail eggs (clear gel-like goo).
3) Dip the plants in alum for snails, hydrogen peroxide for most bacterial problems, salt water for many parasites, Excel for algae, chlorine bleach for any of several problems, potassium permanganate...
4) Dip the plants in whatever deactivates the stuff you dipped them in.
5) Grow the plants in a quarantine tank for a month. Pretty much all fish diseases and Ich will not survive for a month without a host.
You need to do the research and decide:
Which product. NEVER mix these materials. Do not treat the plants in one after the other after the other... Pick one. If the plant needs to be dipped in something else give it some recovery time. All these materials damage the plant a bit. Let it recover.
Dosage: Soft plants, mosses, crystalwort... will not tolerate higher doses or long duration. Sturdy leaves like Anubias will be OK with stronger dose or longer soaking.