You should test the water for ammonia & hardness in the bag before you start acclimatizing your fish to your local water. I enjoy my 7.0 city water in Salem Oregon. Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: Barry J. Cooper
Sent: August 23, 2001 4:33 PM
To: killietalk at AKA_Org
Subject: Re: New fish
>Duane wrote:
>
>Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 07:56:31 -0500
>From: Duane Wake <dwake at iopener_net>
>Subject: Re: new fish
>
>Hi,
>
>
> Maybe a 24 hr. drip siphon is a little much but you
>never know until
>it`s too late.When I find a fish that I`ve been trying
>to get for years
>or when I pay $20 -$ 50 for a pr. in an auction, I
>sometimes wonder if
>24 hr.is enough. Better safe than sorry.
>
>Duane
>
>
>
>Well I have acclimated thousands of fish (I have
>worked for several pet stores), including salt water
>fish that sold for a lot more than $20-$50, and I can
>assure you that dripping is no tnecessary. In fact, it
>can be quite harmful potentially. In the bag the water
>generally will achieve a high level of ammonia. If the
>water added is of a higher pH then you will slowly
>poison your new fish as the pH rises. Obviously your
>system works, though perhaps because you take it so
>slow. I can assure you that it is entirely safe to
>take the fish and remove it from the water it came in
>then add it to the new water. I have done it thousands
>of times. BTW, what happened to Wright??? Haven't
>heard from him in a while.
I disagree strongly with this statement. As was already pointed out on this list the strategy required when moving fish from shipping bags to new water entirely depends on the characteristics of each. If you move fish from hard water to hard water, or from soft to hard, you can make the change suddenly, as you say. However, if you are moving from hard water, or water with a high TDS, to soft, low TDS water you will injure or kill them if you don't acclimatize them slowly. The following anecdote supports this.
When I lived in upstate NY I had moderately hard water, very good for the Notho species that I keep. I never used to worry much about acclimatizing new fish, and never had any problems. I now live in Oregon, where we have very soft water. When I got my fishroom up and running I had a shipment of fish sent that were accustomed to hard water of high TDS. I did, of course, add salt to my own water and I did take the precaution of adding my water to the shipping bags in small aliquotes before putting the fish into my water. Despite that, I lost several fish and injured several others with classic signs of osmotic injury. The next time I brought fish in, incidentally wild fish from Kenya and, to me, very valuable, I did drip acclimatization. I didn't see a single fish in distress.
I have to attribute your experiences to the fact that you must have had fairly hard water.
Barry
--
Barry J. Cooper
Department of Biomedical Sciences Home address:
College of Veterinary Medicine 27505 Riggs Hill Rd.
Cornell University Sweet Home, OR 97386
(607)253-4273 (541)367-2568
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