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[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.
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.
I have to be short, but:
1) Drop test will not be influenced, different reagents just turn to specificic color at certain pH.
2) EC going up with alder cones and ketapang leaves is perfectly ok, these are the substances you want in the water, it is just concentrated so you need to learn to work with that. Just find out how much of how concentrated extract you need to add in to certain volume of water. EC helps you track this. Have a look at my reciepe for paro water, you can follow simmilar scheme.
As far as peat goes, there are many types of it and some lower quality peats may release for example to much of fulvic acids at the beginning. However, no need to bother with that. What you are mostly interested with peat is not what you are able to leach out as simmilar (and even better) substances are easy to obtain elsewhere. It is much better to work with the kation exchange capacity of the peat, that will help you acidify the water much further. But it is not needed too, in case we need we are able to find some high kapacity katex that would do the thing.
Hello, somehow I missed this. Well I never really tried to compare such readings as I simply had the equipment. I knew I was going to measure pH in very low conductivity water so I bought the right electrode for that. Than I had no fish for couple years and sold all my laboratory devices that I had. When I started again I just bought normal stuff. How the electrode works is quite well explained for example here (not sure how much this helps 🙂 ): http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_9/6.html. Anyways there are probably some parameters that need to be changed (type of membrane or electrolite) in water with that very low cunductivity as they infulence the readings for the standard electrodes too much in such environment and therefore the electrodes have to be adjusted.
Hello Dorothee,
I did not bother trying yet, but I think you should be able to get lower pH values than you do now. Sadly as long as we use any kind stuff such as alder cones or Terminalia catappa leaves, the results will never be fully comparable. The concetration of active substances may differ a lot and the acid neutralisation capacity of your water may differ from mine even thought we will end up with the same conductivity. Also keep in mind that the pH readings are not exact. I am not sure how much this fact is known, but if you want to measure pH in conductivity lower then 30µS you either should be using a special electrode (mostly possible only with laboratory devices that allow you to exchange electrodes. + the machine and the electrode is like 10x more expensive) to get exact readings OR (much easier 😉 ) you need to take some water from the tank and make the conductivity higher by adding small amount of KCl (3M KCl electrode storing solution) or NaCl. Than you get acurate readings even with the types of devices we use for our purposes (within the boundaries of the device). So we have to be careful about how acurate we can expect our readings to be.
Anyways if you need extreme pH, I am sure we would be able to come up with some good kation exchanger resin to prepare such water, that would be easy to use and one could use it for years. The principle is the same as with peat, which is (or more precisely humic acids in it) kation exchanger too besides leaching out some acids in the first place. On the other hand, the Ketapang leaves extract has such a strong antibacterial effect that lower pH values very likely would not be needed.Nice, that is pretty much what I do besides I make alder cones extract and ketapang extract first and use beech leaves as a substrate 🙂 Works perfectly so far. I think use of renewable sources instead of peat to prepare the water should be our goal for the future as destroing peat bogs from other localities to preserve species from asian peat bogs does not make much sence 😉
I have to agree with Stefanie. My paros have red eyes quite often and you can see it with bare eyes, it is not just pictures. But I am completely ignorant in a sence why it is so.
I use them as they are, if you did not obtain them on some poluted locality, it should be fine to use them without any further action. Just if you see some of them to get mouldy, get them out and use the rest.
And yeah, there is no such species as sentangensis. Traders often make up scientific names when it comes to paros, so call them spec. sentang for now. Later when pictures are availab le may be some of our experienced members will tell you if the name is correct or not. Parosphromenus species are very often mislabeled.
Hello Aidan and welcome here :),
No worries, them hiding is quite normal when they are stressed from the transport and bad conditions in the store and brought to some new environment after.
