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:ohmy: Hello,
I am new to this forum. I have a 5.5 gallon tank with 4 P. nagyi. At the beginning I was having problems with the PH of the tank, despite the substrate being a 2-1 soil(which has peat) and peat(I had this from, ironically, a environmental restoration project) mix due to the high PH of my tap water. When the PH went down to 6.5 I drip-acclimated the gouramis.I recently became suspicious when one of my fish died about the parameters in the tank. Here they are currently:
0 ammonia
0 nitrite
? nitrate(I can do this if relevant)
7.8 PH!!!How? We’ve been doing w/c with R/O water with a low PH. The tank has 4 Indian almond leaves and is almost opaque. I even use pelletized peat in the filter.
Other tank stats: Java moss, some of which has died on one side, an unknown plant growing out of the filter, 2 Crypt. wendtiis, one Hygrophillia difformis. There has def. been some plant die-off in there. There is a sponger filter which is proportionally too large for the tank, but does not create a large current.
I am currently putting in tiny amounts of hydroponic phosphoric acid(PH down). The PH is now around 7.4. But why did it rise in the first place? What am I doing wrong?
Thank you!
Welcome to P-P forum!
Sad to hear you lost 1 fish.
However, substrate, plants, bad RO water, and lack of knowledge can be a problem with too high pH levels, it also important to do WC (water change) with prepared water. RO, deionised water or clean rainwater is a must. It can be filtered through the peat filter, or mixed with blackwater extract, or it can be added some inorganic acid too. It can work all together to keep low pH values.Hello and welcome,
You are mentioning some soil with peat in your tank. What kind of soil is it? From what you have described, my first guess would be, that you have something very alcaline in the tank and there is enough of it to keep the pH high even thought you have used so much peat. Something has to have a huge acid neutralisation capacity to have such a tremendous buffering effect. In such case adding anorganic acids like you do will require a huge amount of acids and the changes will not be stable for a long time still which means the pH will go up and down couple times As the buffering capacity will be lowered, the volume of the acid necessary for the change will get lower too. Such manipulation is dangerous for the fish, it is very easy to add to much, as the changes are not linear. As soon as the buffering capacity will get consumed, you will experience a very quick dropdown of the pH, possibly to extreme levels. I would strongly recommend starting over and setting up the tank again using only pure natural stuff like leaves and pure peat if needed.
Normally, licorice gouramis don’t die by a rising pH but by illness. But the rising pH can lead to illness. Not because of the pH but because of a grossly rising amount of germs.
Therefore it is necessary to identify the cause of the rising pH; Deepin’Peat gives some possible explanations. But I like to add that the most frequent cause of dying licorice gouramies is Oodinium that is much suppressed by a low germ concentration in a pH below 7 and much developed by a quickly rising concentration in a pH above 7.
And one should further know that a presence of these noxious little beings is hardly or not at all to be seen during the first one or two weeks. We see them on the fish’s skin only later (if we look at them very closely), but when we see them it’s mostly too late. This is a common experience of the most experienced breeders.
Therefore: Do every thing to prevent a pH rising above 7.0, better above 6.0. The most important reason to take care for a low pH in the tanks of our fish is that they are evolutionarily accustomed to such an often very low pH for just this avoidance of germs that cannot live in this milieu.
I know that it’s actually side effects of the PH, not the PH itself, that causes the gouramis to die. Sorry, I should have been more careful with my words. I also want these guys to breed; no use having an endangered fish if you’re not going to reproduce them, as this site says!
I just tested a couple tanks I set up with the same soil, and it turns out that they also have a huge buffering capacity. Since most plants tend to like an acidic PH, I assumed that it would be acidic over the long run also. With the other tanks it’s fine(and, in one case, good!). You’d think a soil with peat listed as a high main ingredient could be trusted..oh well. I will redo the tank today with only peat + sand in the substrate. FYI, I do a lot of Walstad setups.
Btw, the gourami that died appeared to have silvery patches, kinda like bunches of scales had come off. Kinda looked like he had been in a bad fight.
It’s good that you will concentrate on breeding. Then you should follow the hints that Martin Hallmann and I give in our Paro-book (P. Finke/M. Hallmann: Prachtguramis. Aqualog 2013; available for example by Amazon).
This means: nearly no substrate (a layer of one cm only or nothing, you should use no plants growing in the ground; they always influence the environment (some floating Ceratopteris or Javamoss are good), ten or fifteen dried leaves of beech or oaks instead on the ground, a cave, wood possible freshly taken from a peat swamp (old dry wood may change the water parameters to large an extent), a leaf of Terminalia catappa on the back glass, some alder cones, that’s the essentials. When you are more experienced, you can make exeriments with mor plants, but you should omit the Crytps. In most Paro-biotopes are no submerged plants; they don’t need them. Try to forget the traditional way of aquarium set ups; it’s blackwater aquaristics which you are going to be acquainted with.
[quote=”SchizotypalVamp” post=4439] You’d think a soil with peat listed as a high main ingredient could be trusted..oh well. [/quote]
The point is that there are alot of substrates and soils sold for planted tanks because planted tanks are a very good business oportunity for the production companies. Some of these are even very good but they are designed to provide the best environment for plants, not for Paros. + Sometimes people will sometimes sell you anything that you are willing to pay for 🙂 and that means even stuff that was not tested for long enough or just did not harm the molies and other “average” fish during the testing period which was sufficient for them to start selling it.
Peter Finke: I was under the impression that the Paro book was only in German? I just searched on amazon.com and can’t find it.
Why is it bad to have a couple C. wendtii growing in there? I know you know better than me, but I would like to know.
Could you critique my setup? I just redid the tank. I have
-Peat covered with sand
-Tons of leaf litter, both oak and indian almond leaf
-light shines through the back(clamp lamp), so I can’t cover it. However, it’s really dark and blocked in a lot of places. Plants can’t grow except almost next to it.
-Lots of java moss(and some algae, which I let grow)Still have the crypts for now. I was under the impression that many remaining licorice gouramis come from ditches, and crypts flourish in peat-bog environments, so why are they bad?
Deepin peat- I actually generally use organic gardening soil which I research beforehand. Even ADA has basically admitted its soil is basically the same as doing this. For more on this, see Tom Barr and Diane Walstad.
Also, lots of caves and I am getting some Cardinia sp. shrimp to hopefully breed in the tank and provide food.
1. The Paro book is in German, but it can be bought by Amazon (mentioning an easy method).
2. C. wendtii is not a blackwater plant. You could try it, but remember that it is dependent from nutrional sources that hardly can be combined with a stable blackwater milieu. You will not meet an optimum for both Paros and C. wendtii from Sri Lanka clear waters.
3. Peat is not peat and sand is not sand; this information is not precise enough. But I am more interested in the height of your bottom layer. You don’t need a normal aquarium’s height. It could complicate the care to large an extent. If you want to breed your fish, you should begin with an optimum environment for them and not with a compromise. The fish-plant-combination that we like to see in aquariums is a gardening-idea; the peat bogs look entirely different.
4. “tons” of leaf litter?
5. If there are a few submerged plant in peat bogs, surely not C. wendtii. Until now we cannot reproduce the milieu for the special crypts of very acid milieus. They are sometimes cultivated in emersed a form in special materials, but I don not now of any stable and easily managable method for submerged forms of e.g. C. pallidinervia or C. bullosa.
6. I like Walstad, but she writes on a normal planted aquarium and does not treat a blackwater milieu with pH often below 5 or less and nearly no minerals in the water. She would warn us to create such environments if plants in mind.
7. Nearly all Caridinia spec. cannot stand such a milieu for longer than some weeks. One of our next tasks for research is to determine which shrimps live in the Paro-biotopes. There are often lots. Hitherto they are not available in the aquarium trade.2.)C.wendtii is actually very happy with extremely low light-but I was confusing it with other crypts which do come from blackwater peat environments. Will it pose a threat to the fish if I leave it in? Because it is growing, despite the extreme blackwater of the tank.
3.)I would say about half an inch of substrate. The peat is dried sphagnum peat, resembling dirt. The sand is washed and filtered “play sand”, which is not cloudy. There are no further details on these. In my experience with peat bogs, there is generally a sand-covered highly tannic organic layer?
-I don’t plant my tanks like a garden-I try to base them on the water which my fish came from. I believe that plants
are effective filters and perhaps release compounds beneficial to fish, and also encourage the growth of
microfauna. Part of my reasoning is that in a true bog, this would be true of plants outside of/emergent in the
water, and while I cannot recreate the exact conditions, I wish the fish to experience as many benefits as
possible.
4.)Half-decomposed leaf litter completely covers the bottom 1-2 leaves thick.
5.)touche! Thank you.
6.)I agree, but what about the case where the PH is around 5.0-6.0? Don’t licourice gouramis also thrive in these
conditions?
7.)I would love this. However, I thought that another member kept shrimps with their gouramis-how is that possible?ad 2) C. wendtii does best in better light conditions. Your tank is a compromise.
ad 3) With gardening I mean the idea that a normal aquarium needs many growing plants, a good idea. Nevertheless, you must distinguish between the structure of a natural biotope (with a huge bottom and rather little amounts of flowing waters) and a tank. You cannot copy that by having a bottom layer a bit thicker, an inch or three inches. Your ideas of plants as filters are very good for normal aquaria, but not for specialized blackwater tanks. Of course, you can try intermediate ways, but you will not meet the full requirements, neither of the Paros, nor the plants.
ad 4) good!
ad 6) some do, but others not. In most natural habitats the pH is lower (see literature!). What you intend (and many of us, admittedly) is a compromise. We are caught by the images in our head and the wish to see nice green plants in our tanks that should look nice and cozy. Walstad was a huge progress in America compared to the very unnatural and ugly tank-models that were in usage before. But she offers no recipe for a Paro-tank. The only thing I want to say is: Paros in their home-habitats do not live in underwater gardens. Mostly, there are only grasses growing at the side and hanging partly into the water.
ad 7) I would love this too. But experiments show that nearly all of our traded shrimps don not flourish in nearly destilled water with low pH. A friend of mine had some success with a rarely traded small species, but again at a relatively high pH and a mineral content near the border of Paro-conveniance.I am sorry, but your wishes are those of many aquarists. Nevertheless, the structural differences between nature and the tank are important. We forget this with our usual aquaria, In this case we see them very clearly. Anyway: You can continue to make compromises, of course, I do it in some of may tanks, too. But we should see them as what they are: compromises. If you want to breed your fish as your dominant aim, then you should give them an environment which is as much as possible constructed for their need and not for yours.
The recipe to put the peat under the sand or soil sounds a bit like the advices for aquascaping…
My son has recently bought an used tank with soil, floor heating and floor fluter….The people who take peat as ground material here in the project cover just the bottom of the tank with it and than some leaves above … There is a thread about that …
Now Peter is right, I’ve even caught almost all of my fish in the biotopes and except no plants found in alfredi, rubrimontis and paludicola I have, moreover, the ground was mostly peat mud, sometimes more than a meter deep and the pH values were often at ph 3, where the Paros felt comfortable and hid themselves in the embankment or overhanging grass and twigs.
There are always some pictures of Paros in planted aquariums, but I think that will not be good for the Paros in the longer term, although there are several spawns, but there is little Changen the pups in a separate aquarium implement them effectively feed and provide support. :SGreetings Bernd Bussler
Thank you for all of your replies so far. I generally keep sand on top because it helps to keep all the floating organic matter out of the water.
I will reply more in depth later, as I have had a busy day. But I am very grateful for all of the time spent to reply to me.
I will remove the ground plants, as you’ve convinced me.
One more thing, has anyone ever attempted a paludarium type setup with grasses growing on a high bank?
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