Guide 24 — Care Guide

Quarantine Basics

New arrivals carry more than you can see. This guide covers why quarantine matters, how to set up a simple holding tank, and how long to wait before anything joins your main system.

Why Quarantine Matters

Every new arrival — fish, shrimp, snail or plant — has spent time in water and conditions you had no control over. That includes a supplier's holding system, transit, and whatever lived alongside it before it reached you. Parasites, bacterial and fungal infections, and hitchhiking pest snails can all travel in without any visible sign on the animal itself.

A quarantine period is simply a holding window in a separate, controlled space before anything is introduced to an established tank. It gives you time to observe behaviour, appetite and condition without risking your existing stock, plants or substrate colony if something turns out to be wrong.

Setting Up a Quarantine Tank

A quarantine setup doesn't need to be elaborate. A simple, bare or lightly furnished tank with reliable filtration is enough. What matters is that it is a genuinely separate system — its own filter, its own equipment, its own water — not a section of your main tank sharing water or gear.

• —  A sponge filter or small internal filter, ideally seeded with mature media or run alongside a small starter dose of beneficial bacteria
• —  Minimal decor — enough to reduce stress, not so much that you can't see the animals clearly each day
• —  Water parameters matched to your main tank, introduced through the same slow acclimation process you'd use for any live arrival
• —  Its own net, siphon and maintenance tools, kept away from your main tank's equipment to avoid cross-contamination

Because a quarantine tank isn't fully cycled in the way an established system is, keep stocking light and monitor water quality closely — ammonia and nitrite can build up faster in a small, lightly filtered volume than most keepers expect.

How Long to Quarantine

There's no single figure that fits every species, but a commonly used window across the hobby is two to four weeks. This is long enough for most common parasites and infections to show visible symptoms, and long enough to confirm an animal is feeding normally and holding condition before it goes anywhere near your main stock.

Shorter periods reduce the value of quarantine considerably — some issues simply haven't surfaced yet at one week. Longer periods aren't wasted either, particularly if you're holding several batches and want to stagger introductions rather than adding everything to the main tank at once.

What to Watch For

Daily observation is the point of the exercise. Watch appetite and feeding response, colouration, activity level, breathing rate in fish, and any spots, film, unusual growths or lesions. For snails, check the shell is intact and growing, that the animal is active and responsive when handled, and look closely for anything hatching that you didn't put in yourself.

If anything looks off, the quarantine tank is exactly where you want that problem to be — isolated, easy to treat, and nowhere near an established system. Extend the quarantine period if treatment is needed, and only move stock across once symptoms have fully resolved and normal behaviour has returned for several consecutive days.