The Puffer Library

Colombian Shark Catfish

There are more than a few fish that show up in stores which realistically cannot be maintained in captivity in the home short of unlimited budgets and considerable professional assistance. Too many of these are just too big to be managed as a hobby fish, but stores may tell you that they can live in hobby tanks. That is unjustified. If you keep a horse in a dog crate, does it become a house pet? I suspect that you know the answer to that question. The same thinking applies to fish. This is the first of a projected series of articles on fish that are only marginally appropriate to inappropriate for hobby home fish keeping.

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You & Chlorine or Chloramines

Introduction:

In the United States, most of us get our water for home and aquarium use from our taps. Our taps are supplied with water by a local community, city, or area utility. Those utilities are highly regulated by state and local governments, which are in turn under regulation by the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency of our federal government. The EPA sets the rules under which our local utilities operate. They define what agents are used to process and disinfect our water supply, and how much of the agent can or must be used. (» Click here to read the rest of this article…)

Considerations in Fishless Cycling

Some years ago Dr. Chris Cow, an organic chemist and hobbyist, developed a hobby-level technique for establishing that part of the nitrogen cycle important to our tanks without using and abusing live fish. Not the original articles (that site no longer exists), but a good retrospective exists at:

http://malawicichlids.com/mw01017.htm

Chris (a.k.a. Nomad) shared his technique with others on a forum that had a number of experienced hobbyists. Several of those served as beta-testers of the technique, and were quite impressed with how well it worked. That core group started popularizing the technique on the other forums they visited, and the rest is history. Cycling without fish was not novel, several variants had existed for years prior to that time. Some of those variants required knowledge of chemistry and either access to a laboratory or an exceptionally well-equipped home lab, or were completely uncontrolled and frequently smelly. Chis’ technique was and is a better fit with hobby materials and required no special lab equipment, only patience and persistence. (» Click here to read the rest of this article…)

Iridescent Shark Catfish

Pangasianodon hypophthalmus, the Iridescent Shark Catfish, is a large omnivorous migratory catfish from the Mekong Basin. The fish is widely aquacultured in its native areas. It has a listed maximum standard length of 130.0 cm or ~51.2 in; not exactly a small fish. An even more interesting bit of information is that at full size its body weight would be expected to be 44.0 kg or ~97 pounds. To further complicate the fish’s would-be keeper’s problems, this is another schooling fish, with a suggested minimum group of five individuals. Alone or in too small a group, the fish will be much more nervous and skittish. Most of the traded-in catfish of this species which I have seen showed moderate to severe injuries of the head and eyes from slamming into the glass or tank equipment. Now let’s see – the needed tank size for a group of five over four-foot long fish which weigh close to a hundred pounds each, are very fast swimmers, and extremely easily spooked fish would be what? Something larger than home swimming pools, but perhaps a bit less than a competition sized Olympic swimming pool? Try to imagine the water and power bills.

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Water Change Math - General

In other articles I push using nitrate (NO3) as an indicator of general pollution, and I still do that, but obviously that cannot be used in a planted tank, or even in tanks with functional microporous biomedia – which can denitrify, or in tanks with plenums – which do denitrify, coil denitrators – also for denitrification, or with added chemicals or exchange materials which complex nitrate. So what do we use? We have nothing that we can measure directly by hobby level test kits. Instead we use a hand-held calculator, or the comparable program in our computers, or even by pencil and paper. We calculate what our water changes are doing and what they are leaving behind, and then we decide what sort of schedule we can live with and/or live up to, and then that is what we do.
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Diatoms are very common algae (yes, they really are algae) in the world. They occur in freshwater, brackish water, seawater, soils, and damp exposed (emerse) situations. They have yellow-brown photosynthetic pigments, so most forms appear brownish to us. In tanks, mostly we see diatoms on lighted surfaces such as the tank walls, décor (rocks, ceramics, plastics, substrate, etc.) and as coatings on plants (either live or artificial). In freshwater (FW) they are generally unicellular, single cells, but in marine environments can have much more complex colonial forms. (» Click here to read the rest of this article…)

Water Change Math, OTS

And Other Mismatches Between Tank and Source Water

This note assumes that you have read the note on what OTS is itself as well as the article on general Water Change Math, if you have not yet read those, you may want to scan them for background which may not be reviewed here.

Old Tank Syndrome, OTS {Click}

Water Change Math {Click}

When the water we want and plan to use does not match at all well with the existing tank conditions, if we do substantial changes we will subject the fish to sudden differences in the osmotic pressure of the water around them. This stress may be so severe that the fish suffer shock and may even die. They are adapted, hopefully and usually slowly, to the water that they are living in now. Too much change too fast is a system overload. This situation on the boards is commonly called “pH shock”, but it is not that, even though the pH may well be quite different. It is osmotic shock from the sudden change in TDS (total dissolved solids).  TDS includes GH, KH, nitrate ion (NO3–), sodium chloride (Na+, Cl-), carbonates and bicarbonate, and all the other dissolved materials that we do not measure (potassium, sodium, sulfates, phosphates, organics, etc.).
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The Salt of the Earth, the Salt from the Sea . . .

We say (or at least my grandmother said) that someone is “worth their salt” or perhaps “not worth their salt”, meaning that the person under discussion justifies their existence (or not) by their actions. Can we apply this same sort of value system to the mineral in question itself? Is salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) worth its salt in the freshwater aquarium? Disclaimers are needed first: This is my personal opinion, not the official doctrine of this site, but just me, the cranky old fogy who has rather strong opinions on a number of fish-keeping topics. (» Click here to read the rest of this article…)

Vegetable Filters

It is generally accepted that healthy plants have a beneficial effect on the water conditions in fish tanks. They absorb minerals including some metabolic waste products from the water, converting these into plant mass. So these may be considered a form of biofiltration. The other mineral ions that they absorb and use could be considered a form of chemical filtration. During their lighted period they adsorb carbon dioxide (CO2), produce oxygen (O2) and submerse plants release excess oxygen into the water, so are also a form of aeration. If the water is not oxygen-saturated, there is no visible evidence of this. In oxygen-saturated conditions, very small bubbles of O2 will form at the leaf surface and be released- this is the “pearling” plant tank growers point to with pride as evidence of strong healthy metabolism in the plants. In the dark they do use oxygen from the water (and release carbon dioxide), but they do not use as much as they produced in the prior light period. So if we accept all that, it is reasonable to want to have plants in our tanks, not just for aesthetic enhancement, or even for refuge for the fish, but for the benefits they can provide to the water quality and thus to our fish. (» Click here to read the rest of this article…)