Adding New Fish

[JTL]

I have some fish that I have quarantined for a couple of months. They are all doing very well. They are a coral beauty, a tail spot, two chromis, a six line and a midas blenny. I want to transfer them to my established 100g DT that has a pair of clowns. Should I do it all at once?

[Kemah]

personally I would do it the chromis, sixline and midas now and do the others in a week or two.

[jbardwel]

I would just put them all in, IMO the real reason to hold fish for a long while before you put them in your tank is to see if they are sick or not, there is probably Ich in most established reef tanks, the fish are just healthy enough to withstand it, your fish are clearly all healthy now

[goochesfish]

all together

[JTL]

I would just put them all in, IMO the real reason to hold fish for a long while before you put them in your tank is to see if they are sick or not, there is probably Ich in most established reef tanks, the fish are just healthy enough to withstand it, your fish are clearly all healthy now

Ich is an ongoing discussion. Some tanks may have undetectable ich, but if you follow the rules of quarantine the likelihood is very low.

[Kemah]

The only reason I wouldn't put them all in at the same time is that it could cause a descent cycle to occur. If you had to do it no biggie, but since you obviously dont have to put them in all at the same time, why risk stressing them out and the possibility of killing them. I think over all it would just be better practice.

[Daniel Reef]

The only reason I wouldn't put them all in at the same time is that it could cause a descent cycle to occur. If you had to do it no biggie, but since you obviously dont have to put them in all at the same time, why risk stressing them out and the possibility of killing them. I think over all it would just be better practice.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but what do you mean by descent cycle? Also, if all of the fish are in the same QT, would that affect the stress that they are experiencing now?

[JTL]

The only reason I wouldn't put them all in at the same time is that it could cause a descent cycle to occur. If you had to do it no biggie, but since you obviously dont have to put them in all at the same time, why risk stressing them out and the possibility of killing them. I think over all it would just be better practice.

Can't argue with that logic. I would like to get the old tank out of my way while I am home for the holiday so I will probably do a few one day and the rest the next day. The DT is very established with lots of LR so I don't expect much of a spike.

[Kemah]

When you add additional bio load to a system eventhough you have gone through your initial cycle you can have mini cycles throughout the life of the tank. In a big enough system youmay never notice one of these and most people dont test for them. Its the same thing that can happen if you have a large die off. So when he is saying that he wants to add 6 new fish to a 100 gal system my opinion is that he would be better off adding them half and half. I dont think this will stress the fish anymore than adding them all at once as far as separation is concerned but because of the additional bio load he may get more than a mini cycle tat is undetectable. In my old 180 gal ds with a 75 gal sump that was fully cycled I wanted to try out some tangs that dont normally get along so well so I decided to add them all at once. 5 tangs and none of them more than 4 inches added to the tank and i had detectable levels of ammonia. It went away pretty fast because like i said it was a mini cycle. But the tank didnt have it self ready for that new biological load.