thoughts on new fish death...

[Magnum Man]

not ones that arrive doa, but you get them, and they look healthy, but don't survive quarantine, or die shortly afterwards... and not to beat the dead horse of Dan's hard water, but he publicly posts about his hard water, I'm sure many mail order sellers, and or local pet stores use the water in their area... so I suspect most fish can live for a while in good clean water, that is out of their natural parameters, either too had, or too soft... but maybe not long term ( that was certainly my experience pre RO filter, at my home... we have rock had water )... so now I'm analyzing weather I want a fish that has been at a seller, who doesn't adjust the water for each type of fish, for as long, or as short a time as possible... if a soft water fish is held in a tank system with hard water, for 3 months ( for example ), will that fish recover, when put into a soft water tank again, or will it be here for a month, die, and leave me wondering what I did wrong??? thoughts...

 

[gwand]

My instincts tell me you are correct with some species being more sensitive than others. I’m going to try to Find any scientific articles to support or refute this. We do know that soft water fish kept in hard water long term develop kidney injury and gill irritation. Will a mere one or two month exposure to hard water while sitting in a fish shop waiting to be sold cause irreparable damage?

 

[AJ356]

Good question. My input doesn't answer the question but..... it got me thinking....how realistic is it to expect sellers to adjust their own local water parameters for the fish. I wish it would happen, for sure!! It should happen.......it probably goes back to the somewhat (?) true perhaps, but often flawed.... "fish will adapt".

There is one major fish store near me that keeps their discus, german blue rams, black rams and some of the angelfish and geophagus in soft water, which is nice to see. I wonder how many customers who purchase these fish in my area (hard water) get these fish back into soft water when they get home? I hope a good few, or all do, but I wonder......I haven't checked with the store, but if they are going to the trouble of keeping the fish in soft water in a locality where the water is hard, I hope they put some effort into making sure the customers have access to soft water, but ££££ / $$$$$ talks with sales. I digress from your question........

 

[GaryE]

I don't think it's the water, unless we look at the water in the bags. I've opened bags where the ammonia released on contact with air almost scorched my eyebrows off. Those fish have to get out of the shipping water as fast as possible.
As hobbyists, we often miss the fact that the bag from the farms or from the wild can be quarter box sized, and hold 300 fish. Shipping costs are rising, and crowding is real.
We wouldn't sell them for a few days, until we'd seen they weren't going to keel over in the first week, from accumulated injury. But imagine the fish survives shipping from Thailand, Singapore, or Colombia , maybe with minor ammonia damage, and then gets shipped from city A to city B a week later, again with ammonia in the bag.
Two times unlucky?
Then the hobbyist floats the bag or drip acclimates, a deadly process in my mind.

Shipping is a dangerous lottery. My last purchase was of 28 softwater fish, all sensitive species. One fish died 4 days into quarantine. But from the point the seller listed the species, I took a risk and waited ten days, then got them at exactly 24 hours after they'd entered the courrier system. I'll wager they were in the bag 2 or 3 hours before pickup.

 

[Rusty_Shackleford]

I don't think it's so much a case of fish will adapt, fish are just very resilient. Maybe more than we even give them credit for.
Just look at what they go through in shipping as Gary has pointed out. I'm sure stuff like that happens on a daily basis.

How do many of our fish survive from season to season living in a flowing creek in the wet season, to a small, drying pool, crammed with other fish in the dry season?
Most of the time they even manage to stay alive in our tiny glass boxes.

 

[Colin_T]

Good question. My input doesn't answer the question but..... it got me thinking....how realistic is it to expect sellers to adjust their own local water parameters for the fish. I wish it would happen, for sure!! It should happen.......it probably goes back to the somewhat (?) true perhaps, but often flawed.... "fish will adapt".

We used to adjust water chemistry in most of the pet shops I worked in. We are fortunate here and have soft water so we didn't need to reduce the hardness for tetras, barbs and rasboras, but we did need to increase the pH, GH & KH for the livebearers and African Rift Lake cichlids. I also did it at home in my own tanks.

Should all shops, importers and suppliers make sure they have soft water tanks for soft water fishes and hard water for hard water fishes?
Yes they should. It's not hard, nor that expensive. If you have hard water and sell soft water fishes, you get a reverse osmosis unit and use soft water in their tanks. If you have soft water and want to stock hard water fishes, buy a bag of Rift Lake water conditioner and increase the hardness. It's really not hard. We were doing this back in the 1980s so everyone should be doing it now.

If you plan on selling fish, you are expected to know how to keep fish and you should be providing them with an environment they can survive in. This means adjusting/ modifying the water chemistry to suit the species. This applies even more if you are dealing with wild caught fishes because they come from certain conditions and don't do well out of those conditions.

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As for how much time do fish need to be in the wrong conditions before it affects their overall health or lifespan?
Who knows but my guess is one month in the wrong type of water will probably do some damage that might be irreversible. I think Byron might have known the answer to this but he's no longer with us. If I recall correctly, Byron wrote something about calcification in softwater fishes' internal organs when kept in hard water and the fish's lives were noticeably shortened due to that.

I have seen African Rift Lake cichlids from Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika live for 2-3 years in softwater (GH below 100ppm), but they didn't breed readily and didn't survive past 5yrs of age even when put into hard water for the rest of their life. I have seen the same species of cichlids live for 10+ years in hard water tanks and they bred all the time. So keeping hard water cichlids from Africa's Rift Lakes in soft water for a year or more, will shorten their life.

I can tell you that fish that spend 5 minutes or more in water with a high ammonia level and a pH above 7.0 does permanent damage to the fish and either kills them straight away or reduces their life to a few months at the most. Fish that have been exposed to lower levels of ammonia in water with a pH above 7.0 can live longer but generally don't live a full lifespan for their species.

Just because we can keep fish in the wrong water chemistry, doesn't mean we should. We have the knowledge, test kits, reverse osmosis units to reduce hardness in water, and mineral salts to increase hardness. There is no reason at all to not modify your tank water to suit the species living in it. People take vitamin supplements and drink filtered water to improve their health. Why shouldn't we provide the same care for our pets, regardless of if they are dogs, cats, birds, fish or reptiles?

 

[Colin_T]

I don't think it's so much a case of fish will adapt, fish are just very resilient. Maybe more than we even give them credit for.
Just look at what they go through in shipping as Gary has pointed out. I'm sure stuff like that happens on a daily basis.

It happens, have a read of the link below for more info on what fish go through just to get into a pet shop.

Fish Importing, from the farm to the home

If any of you have wondered how aquarium fish get to the local pet shop, the following will give you some insight as to what they have to go through to get from the fish farm where they are bred and raised, to the pet shop where you can buy them. The stress they go through is quite...

www.fishforums.net

How do many of our fish survive from season to season living in a flowing creek in the wet season, to a small, drying pool, crammed with other fish in the dry season?

Most fish that end up in small shallow pools of water during the dry season get eaten by birds, reptiles and other predators like mammals. I used to collect fish down south and in summer there would be small shallow pools of water. Some had fish in and I would scoop them out and take them to a river or large pool. The pools that didn't have fish in had lots of bird footprints around them. So the birds come down and catch and eat the fish. It's easier than shooting fish in a barrel because the pools only had an inch or two of water and might have been 1-2 feet in diameter. Some of the deeper pools (6-10ft diameter x 4-6ft deep) might have fish in them over summer but they might also dry up into small puddles and the birds eat everything. There's also an issue of a big fish or crustacean living in the pool and they eat everything they can catch.

The vast majority of fish trapped in small pools of water during the dry season will die. We don't notice this as much because fish can reproduce quickly and produce hundreds of young every few weeks. This allows their numbers to build back up quickly, but they generally have a boom/ bust lifecycle if they don't have permanent water.

 

[GaryE]

It's a small sample story, but an experienced and skilled friend once brought some mollies she'd found in a rock pool left behind by an evaporating stream - some Poecilia schenops. At my house, they lived about six months, never bred are barely grew from the young adult size they arrived at. She had gone back the next day thinking she wanted more from the other pools, and there were no other pools anymore.

I always figured those fish had barely survived, but the heat, poor water conditions and such had rendered them shadows of what they could have been.

I have heard of fishers in the Amazon region driving trucks onto the riverbed and collecting vat after vat of trapped tetras and Otocinclus out of left behind pools. They say it's the easiest way to fish. I was also told they time it carefully, from experience so the fish are still basically fine. But again, Otos are jammed into shipping bags to keep the cost low, and we get the results.

If I ran a business that sold a lot of softwater fish, I would go off a serious water report. I don't know if I'd work differently than the store being discussed. That would depend on the water chemistry. You can have alkaline water with low mineral hardness, and that would be fine. But a high mineral hardness would mean an investment in industrial RO, and in water holding systems to maintain the tanks with. It would increase costs, but if you sell rare fish you have a market that can deal with that.

Again, limited experience, but I fished in Gabon at the end of a dry season. Water levels were low, but the water was clean and very mineral poor. It was close to rainwater. There were a few "trap pools", and the fish from them were wrecks. Mostly though, the streams were maybe a small percentage of rain times volume, but still very functional. The fish didn't have that much to adapt to - less food, slightly more crowding and maybe slightly higher temperatures. Even some very delicate species survived a long trip here in flying colours.

 

[GaryE]

I'll add though, all the fish I brought back were one to a bag, in breathers. 300 to a bag would have had different results, as would poly bags, in most likelihood.

 

[f_luxus]

One point I haven't seen mentioned here yet is pathogens in the new water that aren't yet adapted to the immune system, or rather, to which the fish's immune system isn't yet adapted. With guppies, you can often observe that many fish introduced into a new tank become ill, while their offspring have no problems. Adaptation problems to pathogens would certainly be one possible explanation. Stress, caused by strong fluctuations in the tank parameters, leads to cortisol release, which has been proven to weaken the immune system, thus increasing the likelihood of illness. That's my explanation. Soft-water fish can live quite long in hard water; I know of tetra tanks with hard water where the same school has been swimming for years. The reverse is more problematic. Fish from hard water don't have the ability to adequately regulate osmotic pressure. Many soft-water fish, however, need soft water to reproduce. I once read that some eggs only develop when the water is soft enough.

 

[GaryE]

One point I haven't seen mentioned here yet is pathogens in the new water that aren't yet adapted to the immune system, or rather, to which the fish's immune system isn't yet adapted.

That's also a key point. A lot of aquarium pathogens thrive in harder water, but can't survive in soft, acidic conditions. Soft water fish are faced with a dangerous array of pathogens their bodies have had no reason to adapt to.
So you can conceivably put a very healthy softwater fish into a harder water aquarium, have it encounter something very dangerous its species would simply never encounter in the wild (like a first contact.new virus situation for humans) and have it wipe out the lot. It's a reason why I tried to avoid mixing wild caughts with plaguey farmed fish, and kept them apart for life when I could get fish directly from the shipper's box. Once the fish have been mixed in a holding facility, then all defences are down.

I do long quarantines not only to avoid bringing problems in, but to protect new fish at their most vulnerable from encountering the invisible dangers my previously exposed or adapted fish may be immune to.