Tropical Fish Forum
Tropical Fish Keeping Help and Advice => General Fishkeeping advice => Topic started by: ColinB on January 30, 2013, 01:27:20 PM
-
Er.... here's an interesting article on temperature...
http://www.seriouslyfish.com/whaddaya-mean-too-hot/ (http://www.seriouslyfish.com/whaddaya-mean-too-hot/)
-
Hmmm, interesting.
I would like to question the writer on some of my observations though.
Ocassionally I have forgotten to turn the heater back on after a water change, several times in cold weather. We don't keep the house at tropical temperatures. The kitchen is kept colder than the lounge, and even the lounge is only heated during the day, at night the temperature drops. It is the lounge heater I usually forget (the plug is out of sight but the kitchen tanks' plugs are easily visible)
The last time I forgot to plug the lounge tank's heater on, it was 4 days before I realised :-[ The temp had dropped to 19oC. I had been wondering what was wrong with my fish as they'd started behaving differently. Instead of being out and about, they were all hiding or lying on the bottom. I'd even got as far as testing for ammonia and nitrite to see if they were to blame. It was only when I put my hand in the tank to rescue an upside-down nerite snail that I noticed the water was too cold. I turned the heater back on, and the fish slowly returned to normal.
In view of the article Colin linked to, was the 'odd' behaviour the natural behaviour, and the 'normal' behaviour a response to water that was too warm rather than the way round I had assumed?
-
Hmm, it is interesting.
When I first started reading about tropical freshwater fish, I looked at the asian biotopes. It suggested that it was the colder temperatures that triggered breeding in a lot of cases. This is because a large increase in cooler water mimicked the change from the dry to the wet seasons. In the dry season, the rivers dry out and therefore the water level drops and the water temperature rises. When the rains come, the water levels quickly increase with lower temperature water. This also co-incides with a significant increase in insect life and therefore tends to be when the breeding season for most fish occurs.
I have tried to test this theory in my tank, though not rigorously. Every so often, I do a larger than normal water change. I try to get the new water that goes into the tank a few degrees cooler than the tank water, so the resulting temperature is a couple degrees cooler than it was before the water change. I then feed the fish on frozen, meaty foods for a couple days. I think I read about this technique for encouraging gouramis to spawn, but I no longer have gouramis and the corys seem to cover the tank in eggs over the following week.
I have scuba dived quite a lot on both the Carribean and Pacific reef systems. And the water temperature there is a pretty consistent 27-29 degrees. Obviously this is only relevant if you have a marine tank (http://www.thinkfish.co.uk/marines/cost) - which I don't actually know anything about!
-
Cories do that with spawning after adding cool water. In their case it is melt water from the snow on the mountains that triggers spawning. It worked for my pygmy cories shortly after I got them (though the endlers followed then round and ate the eggs as fast as they were laid)