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Unbagging fish
Here is an excerpt from my upcoming angelfish book
(the very last), based on discussions and publications from Dr. Jack Gratzek an
expert who has worked for the pet industry and on many tropical fish
diseases. Bottom line is that you should not introduce foreign water into
your system, but discard the incoming shipping water, gradually adding your own
replacement water to the bag. This needn't take more than 30 minutes whether one
incoming bag or many. I recently had an excellent example of what happens
when you mix external fish with your own. A Thai fellow was here collecting
natives. We brought them back and they looked in excellent health. Out of room,
we put three extremely healthy looking minnows into a 40 with a large batch of
bettas. Within two days almost all the bettas were dead and one of the three
minnows was dead, with all fish showing no obvious symptoms of disease (which
apparently did all its damage internally). So here's the excerpt -
Unbagging
You've picked
out six plain angels and taken them home. Don't
simply dump them into your
tank. Angelfish are sensitive to bright
lights and temperature changes. Do as
the dealers do. Turn off the
room (and tank) lights, and float the plastic
bag of angelfish in
the aquarium for a half hour. During this time the
temperature of
the water in the plastic bag will change to the temperature of
the
water in your tank.
Now open the
bag, spill off some bag water into a bucket, and
replace it with tank water.
It's important for disease prevention
to introduce the least amount of pet
shop water with the new fish.
Let the bag float another five minutes, and
then again discard some
water from the bag and replace it with more tank
water. Repeat this
discard and replace exercise 4 or 5 times. By this time
any
differences in water quality (hardness, pH, other
chemical
characteristics) have disappeared, and the fish have been
gradually
adapted to your tank water rather than exposed to a sudden
change.
Should you now
dump the remaining water with the fish into the
tank? It's a better idea to
net the fish from the bag so that no
pet shop water at all gets into your
tank. Not everyone is this
careful but, like washing your hands after going
to the bathroom,
it's good hygiene that might prevent the transmission of
a
contagious disease.
The lights
should be left off and the fish not fed until the
following day. That allows
them to learn their new environment in
dim light (which is less stressful)
and give their stomachs a
chance to settle down. That first night they will
go to sleep a bit
hungry. The next day they will wake up gently as dawn
lights the
room of their new tank, and they will have a healthy appetite.
The
time to put the tank light on is when the fish are wide awake and
will
not be frightened by sudden bright illumination.
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