The Puffer Forum

So, last night I freaked out as I swapped my filters around from my tanks and left for work. Only to come in and find one of the tanks was unusually cloudy. I was so worried but found out it was a bacteria forming to deal with the change. Btw both tanks have been completely cycled and are both freshwater. Not sure if the bacteria was due to one of the tanks being a high PH? But anyway, good news! It cleared right up the next day so i have stopped panicing now. Anyone else had this scare? lol

Any change in the water parameters in any tank can spur a bacterial bloom. If there was a significant difference in the pH between the two tanks (equal to or greater than 0.3 units on the pH scale: i.e. from 7.0 to 7.3 or 7.0 to 6.7 or comparable), swapping the filters between the tanks can promote a bloom of suspended bacteria. It does not always or even often happen, but it can happen.

Folks don't realize how many different bacterial species live in our tanks and how balanced they are against one another. Sudden changes in water parameters can and do promote the possibility of overgrowth of one species or another. Ordinarily, changes of this sort do not affect the nitrification bacteria unless the change drops the tank pH below 6.5 or even worse, below 6.0. At pH points below 6.5, FW nitrification effectively slows, and below 6.0 effectively stops. That is not a big issue as it would be higher pH points, as the toxic nitrogen metabolites are held in harmless form below pH 6.0.

The good news is that most bacteria blooms pass quickly as the water balances it's bacterial components again quickly without the tank keeper's intervention. Many water sources do have strong or significant differences seasonally. Only deep very old aquifers are independent of the seasons.

HTH

Bacteria aside, I do not know the reason why u did this. But this action could pass on nasty things from tank to tank.

scpion wrote:Bacteria aside, I do not know the reason why u did this. But this action could pass on nasty things from tank to tank.

Good point, however I can relate to swapping filters around because I moved more fish into one tank so I moved a bigger filter onto that tank and put the smaller one with the lower stocked tank.

Ironically in my case it helped with a bacterial bloom because there were more good bacteria to help a newer tank.

We hope that our members here do not have resident nasty things in their tanks. Such things can happen in QT, but that is isolated from "normal" stock and tanks by definition.