How worried should I be about cross contamination

[Jerry]

I have 2-3 pea puffers in an overgrown 20 gallon long, I placed them in there for quarantine around 2 months ago maybe longer and now they live in there, I don’t know if all 3 made it because the whole tank is covered in Christmas and Java Moss so I only see one or two at a time, I usually scoop out some snails and frogbit from my indoor guppy pond to feed them as I know the guppies are healthy but today I accidentally double dipped the spoon I used to grab the snails, how worried should I be about spreading disease from my puffers to my guppies?  
 

thanks,

Jerry

[Brandy]

not likely. They are realtively healthy...they have been in there for 2 months.

My puffers come out more when I add a dither fish or two. You may want to try a young fast guppy or two. Mine don't bother the fish, or adult neocaridina shrimp--I think because they are still young.

[Kirsten]

I wouldn't be concerned at that level. If there were a known infectious illness in one of the tanks, I'd say hold off on any inter-tank transfer for a bit. But if they're both healthy, no cause for alarm with double-dipping.

Folks will often use the same waterchange equipment on all their tanks, siphon tubes, hoses, buckets, which can get you into trouble if you don't catch an illness right away and find that you've spread it everywhere. But if you keep a close eye on both of them and do minimal amounts of cross-transfer, I don't think you'll have that problem.

[Jerry]

Thank you Brandy & Kristen,

I have watched to many videos where people use separate equipment for each tank and got it in my head that it was common for tanks to spread disease this way

[Jerry]

On 3/11/2021 at 6:29 PM, Brandy said:

not likely. They are realtively healthy...they have been in there for 2 months.

My puffers come out more when I add a dither fish or two. You may want to try a young fast guppy or two. Mine don't bother the fish, or adult neocaridina shrimp--I think because they are still young.

I was thinking of adding them to my 60 gallon tank but I have a lot of banjo cats who’s tails and whiskers poke out of the sand which may look like a snack to the puffers so I decided to leave them in the 20, my original intention was to breed them but if you’ve had luck with a community setting I may add some CPDs into their tank

[Brandy]

On 3/13/2021 at 8:41 AM, Jerry said:

I was thinking of adding them to my 60 gallon tank but I have a lot of banjo cats who’s tails and whiskers poke out of the sand which may look like a snack to the puffers so I decided to leave them in the 20, my original intention was to breed them but if you’ve had luck with a community setting I may add some CPDs into their tank

I know a lot of people find they are super agressive, in my case they are very very well fed and I think that is helping, but I also think they are young. The day may come when everything changes, but so far they are really just death to any snail in the tank, and the baby brine leftovers I sometimes put in. I can tell I have a male and 2 females, but the male is not in breeding coloration (no dark stripe yet) and so I assume that may up his agression level if and when he matures. He has gotten larger, but they are still pretty small. I also would love to breed them, but I think it will be a long shot for me.