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Re: KillieTalk Digest V2 #664

>I am looking for information, help, experiences related to young fish/fry
>dead as a result of shock and/or how to prevent it.


    What Tony T called crazy man's, disease Marshall Ostrow suggested was
acidosis. (One of the TFH books on diseases has a section on it.) Marshall
had been raising industrial quantities of gardneri for some graduate work he
was doing. Outbreaks of that situation were common enough that he looked
into why his gardneri, in ungraveled, bare tanks, would go from looking so
good to so sad in an amazingly short period of time. He concluded in his
case that it was because he was heavily feeding a lot of rapidly growing
killies. Even with very faithful water changes, sometimes the accumulated
wastes in the water would cause a pH plunge and the fish would go nuts. (I
have demonstrated that the problem can happen with smaller quantities of
killies if water changes are ignored.)

    Either he or someone else suggested dropping a quarter teaspoon of
plaster of Paris mix into a tank as a quick fix until another tank could be
readied. I once noticed a ten gallon tank of gardneri Misage getting flighty
just before work one morning. I dropped the recommended plaster of Paris and
left for work with great misgivings. That afternoon the gardneri were no
worse off and maybe a little better than they had been. That tank was
completely changed immediately. The problem went away.

    The few times I've encountered it the tanks were usually bare bottomed.
I wonder if even the relatively hard red flint gravels offer some buffering
capacity.

    Your annuals with their rapid growth and food consumption might be
especially vulnerable to acidosis. I would guess peat moss in an otherwise
bare tank is not going to do much to stop a pH plunge either.

    I have also had a killie or two fatally clobber itself when lights
suddenly went on. The timers are now staggered so that something of a
"sunrise" takes place before I go lurking among the tanks.

    I wonder if a small tufa rock (used in Tanganyikan cichlid tanks) or the
crushed shell grit on the tank bottom favored by rainbow nuts (especially
when raising fry) would help. Obviously too much of those will harden the
water considerably and maybe lead to problems of their own.

    I once raised a nice batch of A. striatum in a tank with a tufa rock.
Nothing on the egg production front happened. The striatum were carefully
switched with a pair of Julidochromis (one of the small Tanganyikan
cichlids). In a couple of weeks there were fry cruising both tanks, once I
go the decore down right.

    Maybe a small start here anyway...

    All the best!

        Scott