Questions on GSP Care

[Norse_Disc]

Hi all, I'm new to puffers and had a few questions GSP after reading articles on them

1)One article I read said to used crushed coral substrates to help maintain to PH, how much of this needs to be used and is this to be used in place of normal aquarium rocks?

2)Is the best way to raise SG to mix products like Instant Ocean into water doing water changes to introduce the water with higher SG into the tank?

3)I was told it was necessary to use distilled water where I bought the fish. Is this true, or can tap water be used if time is taken to cycle it with an fishless cycling product?

4)How fast does the GSP typically grow?

Thanks so much for any help!

[Jase]

Welcome to the forum

1) crushed coral is not necessary. I personally don't like it. The salt will maintain that higher PH anyways, so any substrate is fine.

2)Yes, Instant ocean is a good product. Never add the salt crystals directly to your tank. You must remember to never raise your SG more than .002 per week or your good bacteria will be killed.

3)Distilled water is not necessary (kinda frivolous actually). tap water will be fine but depending where you live I would add a chlorine remover (I use Prime). The only cycling product I know of that actually works is Bio-spira. Anything else is a waste of money. I suggest fishless cycling though. Here is an article on it:
library/water-filtration/fishless-cycling/

4)Growth rate varies, but GSP do not grow terribly fast like bigger fish.

Check out the article in our library on GSP
library/puffers-in-focus/an-introductio ... d-puffers/

[Pufferpunk]

All good info, except #1. I have always used CC or aragonite sand as substrate, to keep the ph steady, around 8. At low SG, there will not be enough salt to affect the pH much.

[Jase]

I guess we both learned something then
Thanks PP

[Myaj]

I guess #1 would depend.. if your water is hard out of the tap, it doesn't matter what you use for substrate as far as pH/hardness is concerned. If you have soft water out of the tap, you'll want a substrate that buffers. I personally prefer argonite sand/small gravel, as when I used crushed coral it grew a ton of algae in a carpet over it. I changed to argonite sand and haven't had any issues for a year now.

#2.. changing salinities is a little difficult to wrap your brain around, but not that hard once you figure it out. The big part, as was said, is you can't raise your salinity more than .002 a week without killing your biofilter (which will kill your fish or at the very least, make them very sick and uncomfortable). So you'll need either a hydrometer (cheaper, not very accurate) or a refractometer (quite a bit more expensive but will be very accurate), to measure the new water you are mixing in. So say your tank is at freshwater (1.000) and you want to raise it to 1.002. You'd remove half the water (its just easier to do it in halves), mix up some new water at 1.004 and add that to the tank. The freshwater will dilute the new water to 1.002. Next time you are at 1.002 already, change out half, you want to raise to 1.004 so mix the new water at 1.006 and I *think* that brings you to 1.004.. sorry, I have the flu and finding it hard to do the math right now.. But anyways, you can do it really simple and slow with just adding an additional tablespoon of salt per week (week one, add one tablespoon, week two, change half the water and add two, week three, change half the water, add three, etc), or you can figure out the math and do it in .002 jumps each week, whatever you feel more comfortable with.

#3 I agree.. distilled water is an unnecessary expense. RO water is, IMO, worth it if you can get it easily.. but then you have to reconstitute, etc. If you have to buy it, or you have a filter that takes 10 hours to filter out a single 5 gallon bucket, its often not worth the hassle unless you have some really delicate corals or horrible tap water (which I've had, and had to use RO). Tap water with Prime as a dechlorinater if you are on city water, is just fine for most situations.

#4, can't help you there.. I haven't kept a GSP since I was a kid, and back then they were all kept in 10 gallon community freshwater tanks and, no surprise, didn't live more than a month or two.

[SeeingGreen]

As a personal experience, my two GSP's have grown from about 1" and 1.25" to about 2.25 and 2.5 respectively. in the six months I have had them. However in the past month is when the majority of growth seems to have come on, I bumped them up to a 55 gallon tank from their 29 and at least by guess they have grown more quickly in that time.

Individual results will vary depending on diet, tank size and water conditions though.
I think the owner of BONZO seems to have been tracking fish size a little more carefully than I however.

[goby1kenobi]

At low SG, there will not be enough salt to affect the pH much.

It's more complex than just the salt -- it's how the calcium and other stuff that's in with the salt will interact with the chemistry of your source water. Two big concerns are hardness and alkalinity. Alkalinity, in this sense, is not "pH > 7", but a measure of how resistant the water is to changes in pH. If you have a low alkalinity, your pH may vary more with the addition of marine salt than it would if the source water has a high alkalinity. If your source water is very hard, and/or your alkalinity is high, your pH may not swing as many points compared to water with low hardness and/or alkalinity. Now throw in the fact that pH is a logarithmic scale, so a change from 7.0 to 8.0 is a factor of 10, not 1... and thus a change from 7.0 to 7.2 is an order of magnitude less than a change from 8.0 to 8.2.

Fortunately, you can get test kits for pH, alkalinity, and hardness, and watch what happens when you add salt to your source water.

My source water has a starting pH of 7.6 to 7.8, and it's very hard and alkaline. Add salt, and the pH goes right up into that 8.2 range and stays there. No aragonite or crushed coral needed for me.

But if your source water has a pH of 7.0 or so, and is soft or not alkaline, you may find you want to use a calcium-based substrate because the calcium in the marine salt isn't sufficient to keep your tank pH where it needs to be.

One alternative I've read about, in lieu of a calcium-based substrate: using filter socks full of crushed coral in the filter. They function as a mid-stage mechanical filter and early-stage bio-filter in a canister or power filter. The person was using a heavily filtered system, with two sets of CC. That way, one could be cleaned (in water removed from the tank during water changes) each week without overly disrupting the bio-filtration the CC was providing.