Tropical Fish Forum
Tropical Fish Keeping => General Fishkeeping Chat => Topic started by: Sue on February 05, 2022, 07:25:11 PM
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I spent most of the afternoon in an attempt to eradicate duckweed from my 180 litre >:( Either there was 1 plant on something I bought or it spontaneously generated in my tank. I have been attempting to find plants which would grow in my tank, so I suspect a contaminant. One week there was none to be seen, then next water change what did I see but quite a lot of duckweed.
I had red root floater in the tank; I removed handfuls of the stuff at every water change as it grows so fast. There's also some floating water sprite "fein", which is fairly new but not the culprit (the duck weed was already there, and the water sprite was in vitro).
So today I removed the water sprite, shaking it carefully before putting it in a bucket of tank water. Then removed handfuls of red root floater + duckweed before finally taking a net and skimming the surface. The water sprite was then rinsed in more tank water and put back in the tank. The red root floater/duckweed is in the bin. I know I won't have got every scrap of duckweed but hopefully I'll be able to remove it as it grows now it's not caught up with the red root floater.
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I have given up trying to eradicate mine and do a skim of the surface every water change like you which keeps on top of it nicely.
I have been dealing with white spot recently after the addition of my angelfish and boosting my cardinal tetra population some of the more elderly fish in my tank got heavily infected - I’ve lost those three fish now and the tank seems fine so I did a sand clean and dosed the medication on more time in an effort to resolve the issue… fingers crossed.
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Have you tried heat treatment for whitespot? I wish I'd known about that after my tank was virtually wiped out several years ago by a strain I just couldn't kill with medication.
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Ahh yes I have raised the temperature too… is that what you are thinking of Sue?
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How high and for how long? It needs to be 30 deg C for 2 weeks or 7 days after the last spot disappears, whichever is longer.
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I need to up the temperature in that case - my energy bill is going to be through the roof!!
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Don't use meds at the same time though. Both heat & meds lower the oxygen content of the water. If you have an air stone it helps - provided your electricity bill doesn't mind ;)
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Think I lost three fish through the white spot… though I’m a little outstanded at what’s happened. It seems to have been three fish who were badly infected. Old fish that were probably past their best before dates. Those fish have passed and there seems to have been absolutely no impact on many of the fish - a couple had a few small spots but they were only there a few days and now there is no sign of anything having ever been wrong with the tank…
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Only stressed fish can get whitespot. It can’t penetrate a fully functional immune system.
If the fish were old their immune systems will have been running at below 100%...
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How high and for how long? It needs to be 30 deg C for 2 weeks or 7 days after the last spot disappears, whichever is longer.
It actually needs to be 32, but only for a day. 30 will stop it reproducing but won’t kill it.
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It is usually stated as 86 deg F so when I converted that it came to 30 deg C?
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It is usually stated as 86 deg F so when I converted that it came to 30 deg C?
There are probably more myths online about whitespot than anything else. We all know about myths. When we gain more knowledge and learn that the myth isn’t true, nothing happens to the myth. It carries on regardless. It’s like the blind leading the blind.
There are 3 ways to kill whitespot.
1. Chemical treatments. These don’t work unless the stressor (the cause of the infection) is removed, hence the myth that chemical treatments on their own don’t always work, and the myth (ime) that there are ‘resistant strains’.
2. Diatom filter. Filters out the free swimming tomonts so they don’t get back into the tank. This method is also a preventative.
3. Raising the temperature to 32C. When it gets to 32 the whitespot dies. The temperature needs to be raised and lowered gradually only for the sake of the fish.
At 30C whitespot stops reproducing. But when the temperature is dropped again, hey presto, reinfection, leading to the myth that you have to keep it at 30 for a long time.
If you use the heat method, it’s pointless using chemical treatments aswell. The chemical treatment doses are timed for key phases in the disease’s lifecycle at ‘normal temperatures’ (25C, I believe). If you raise the temperature you speed up the life cycle (at 32 the life cycle is twice as fast as it is at 22), so the chemical treatments will not work.
Whitespot really is nothing to worry about. It only becomes a ‘serious’ disease because of all the misinformation that stops people from treating it properly. I think of it as the fish equivalent of a cold. Rectify the problem as soon as it appears and chances are the fish will get rid of it by themselves.
If you see whitespot on your fish, your first question should be ‘why?’
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Speaking of myths, just found this...
“This article reports on high-rate nitrification at low pH in biofilm and suspended-biomass reactors by known chemolithotrophic bacteria. In the biofilm reactor, at low pH (4.3 ± 0.1) and low bulk ammonium concentrations (9.3 ± 3.3 mg · liter−1), a very high nitrification rate of 5.6 g of N oxidized · liter−1 · day−1 was achieved.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC525248/?fbclid=IwAR2N2o6fq1ssLqEdrT5ysfSDy4T_X841X4x01dDKZyvkgDJY-fgigaYvk5c#!po=0.892857
5g/litre of ammonia per day processed in a concentration of 9mg/litre at pH4 (and much lower). The bacteria responsible were Nitrosomonas and Nitrospira.
It’s “common knowledge” that these bacteria stop functioning when the pH drops below about 6. Is this a myth?
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That probably became 'common knowledge' when it was observed that cycles took longer at low pH. But when pH is low, other things tend to be low as well - GH and KH for example. For a long time, all people looked at was pH. It could be any other parameter, or lack of, which caused the slow cycle but low pH got the blame.
For example, I have read that the bacteria need inorganic carbonate and lack of that results in a slower cycle. That may also be a myth but it does show people are starting to look at other parameters.
[I use the word bacteria instead of micro-organism, just to make explaining things simpler for those who are new to the idea]
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[Sorry - was testing out whether this thread's title can be modified to (+2022) but it can't, or at least subsequent replies don't retain the new title. Can't delete my post now, so just putting a note here to clarify what I was doing. C:-)]
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I split the thread so that all the 2022 posts are now in a new thread. And edited each post to change the title only - they all said "re: re: Think Fish Keepers Daily News - 2022" so I removed one or the "re:"s