Re: Reconsider use of Baking soda.

["Daniel McMonigle" <Mcdaphnia at msn_com>]

I've raised a lot of fish including that beautiful Tanganyikan killifish and a lot of inverts. I've paid the price of taking the baking soda shortcut.  

Study is always good advice. Homework would certainly make the scientific terminology roll more smoothly off my finger tips, but it wouldn't change the fact that things die because of the baking soda shortcut.

If baking soda does not produce only temporary hardness, then someone is going to have to amend ALL of the textbooks and science websites. Start here: http://www.mp-docker.demon.co.uk/environmental_chemistry/topic_3b/

Back to the topic, the albinistic or red ramshorn snails are weaker in my experience working with them than their darker relatives. Allen made a very good point that a low pH or acidity can etch snails' shells and be disfiguring if not fatal. Keeping the water above 7.0 pH will usually prevent this, and having dissolved calcium, and also digestible soft calcium from cuttlebone, with the snails will promote development of hard healthy shells in the first place. There are also some types of algae that can grow on a snail shell and etch it even in a high pH environment. Perhaps they create a low pH microenvironment.  
  
----- Original Message -----
From: Allen and Sandra
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 8:43 PM
To: KillieTalk at AKA_Org
Subject: Reconsider use of Baking soda?
  
Hardly.  Carbonate=Carbon=basic building block for organic life forms.  (it
also raises KH or Carbonate Hardness.)

It is only as temporary as your next water change.  Baking soda provides a
buffer for the water and helps maintain a pH of about 8.0 to 8.2.  It is not
a "pH up" type chemical like an alkalinity booster, it is a buffer.  Please
guys do some homework that is all it takes.

Boat
(now wondering why he ever entered this conversation)

ps- things like peat and driftwood an such do suck dissolved solids out of
the water, so Baking soda will have to be amended every now and then if
there is a hardness sink such as these.

Allen "Boat" Boatman
Lutz, FL
TBAS, SKS, AKA 08298, SAA 96, CRLCA, NANFA

Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative
on the same night.


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