Re: plant auction preparation

[steev ward <steevward@mac.com>]

>or would you
>let it be longer for bacteria.

There are exceptions, but some fish-pathogenic bacteria are actually difficult
to culture in-vitro. More importantly, as was mentioned during the height of the
anthrax threat, there is a lower limit to the number of disease organisms needed
to cause disease.

Obviously when you have an outbreak of a very contagious disease like Ich or
Velvet you'd want to be very careful about spreading it by passing out samples
of water (especially since these two diseases have an encysted reproductive
phase). I'm just saying that, statistically, when plants are taken from tanks of
fish that are even moderately healthy there is only a low probability of passing
a disease along. Most of these parasites work very hard at finding and staying
on fish. There are differences for each disease of course.

Steev