Do Catfish Feelers grow back?

[Tokis-Phoenix]

I have used salt on all my amazon catfish with no ill-effect on the catfish what-so-ever. In fact they always heal much faster stay free of desiese and grow faster than they ever did before I used salt. Granted you don't want brackish conditions, but a lil salt works wonders. To answer your questions the feeler (aka) barbells, or whiskers are an appendage of the maxillae in whichs is housed thousands of nerve endings and taste buds. Each one has more taste buds than an entire human tongue. They do grow back and this can go quickly or slowly depending on your tank's water parameters. Melafix has always seemed to help mine heal quickly. If you do use salt and heat treatment ensure that you have extra aireation in the water because it can be harder for difused oxygen to be asorbed through the gills. I would suggest a salt treatment over medication any day. It is a more natural treatment, and all bodys of freshwater have salt in them to some degree or another. A general rule of thumb is to use 1 tbsp per 5 gals of water. Slowly increase the salinity of your tanks over time and once you hit this mark keep your tanks their always and you'll notice more healthy and desiese free fish. Only use evaporated sea salt, never iodized salt, because it contains iodine which can be lethal to fish, esp scaless fish. I've had catfish loss whiskers and when they start to grow back you will notice the end of the injury will for a round or ball like end. Then a tiny whisker that looks out of place will start to grow out from there. Usually takes 5 days to about 2 weeks for them to grow back completely. I would also make that larger tank a priority. 100 gals is kinda small for a 20" rtc. Might wish to cut back on feedings a bit until you can get a bigger tank. This will help with water quality, and I would suggest 2 %50 water changes per week until the barbell is completly healed!

"Natural" doesn't mean that its good, yes salt is found in nature, but the waters where amazonian fish like RTC come from, because the massive amounts of flooding and water flow over the millenia in the amazon has made the land almost 100 percent devoid of salt.

The use of aquarium salt came about from two outdated beliefs in early fishkeeping:

1) As "old water" was considered good, to prevent problems from nitrates and nitrites in the water, salt was added. This dulled the effects of poisoning the fish with the aforementioned nitrogenous waste compounds;

2) As FW fish maintain an internal salt level higher than the water around them, it was considered less stress on them to have a higher level of salts in the water. Unfortunately these earlier fishkeepers forgot that FW fish have evolved through millions of years to osmoregulate in the waters effectively devoid of salts, and by adding more it can cause problems with the osmoregulatory functions of the fish.

Nowadays people realise that water changes are far better than old water, and people try and keep the fish in water as close as possible to that in which the fish occur naturally.
Putting RTC is salty water though is just about as "natural" and good for their health as putting clove oil in their water.
In the long term you are placing an increased pressure on the fishes' osmoregulatory systems as they are having to process water with more salt in it than they are evolved to do so.


I am telling you the science and facts of this. I appreiciate some of your advice in other threads, but i strongly disagree with you here with salt use on RTC- why don't you give me some facts about salt use being good for RTC, and maybe i'll believe you?
Experience is important, but doesn't mean you know whats good for your fish if you can't back up your advice with science and facts.

The best thing for the fish is to give it clean water quality, and to try and match the water quality conditions to that of the fishes natural habitat, for optimal health conditions- for RTC this means a practically saltless habitat is the best for them.


Edit: Here is a very enlightening and informative post a very experienced and knowledgeable fishkeeper i know wrote on ph, osmotic stress and salt use, he based his advice on true scientific and accepted research, you should read this;

" OK, well then, here's a little primer on pH, osmotic stres, etc.

Firstly, let me talk about pH. Yes, pH is a logarithmic scale. The p is mathematic shorthand for the negative of the base 10 logarithm (wirtten -log_10) and the H is shorthand for the concentration of H+ ions. So, how does this work? Well, a concentration that has 10^-7 ("ten to the minus seventh power" or 0.000 000 1) moles of H+ ion per liter has a pH of 7.0. The log base 10 of 10^-7 is equal to -7, then the negative of -7 is 7, hence the answer. 1 mole of a substance is 6.022x10^23 molecules of a substance. It is defined like this because in chemistry it is far easier to work in numbers of molecules of a substance for balancing chemical reactions rather than the masses of the reactants.

One really important thing to note here, however, is how small of a number 10^-7 or 0.000 000 1 really is. Now, 10 times that, 10^-6 is 0.000 001. And, while it is a ten-fold difference, both numbers are still really quite small. This is why changes in pH are not as dramatic as they are made out to be. Yes, it is a 10 fold increase to change 1 pH unit, or a 100 fold increase to go 2 pH units, but until you get to pH's of about 2 or 3, we are talking about very small quantities of substances here. And a 10 fold change of a small quantity is almost always still a small quantity. This is why changes of 1 or even 2 units in pH aren't really all that bad for fish, *if the hardness changes aren't too big either* I'll explain this below.

Next, let me talk about osmotic stress. First off, osmotic stress and pH are pretty much unrelated. Osmotic stress is based on the concept of osmotic pressure. The total pressure in a liquid is both a function of the density of the fluid and what has been dissolved in that fluid. The osmotic pressure is the part that is related to what has been dissolved in it. It is useful in determining in what way pure water and/or the minerals dissolved in the water are going to go. As relating to fish, the fish have certain minerals/nutrients they keep in their bodies and of course, the water they live in has certain minerals dissolved in it. Osmotic pressure/stress is NOT a function of the charge of what is dissolved in the fluid, however, so pH being a concentration of a charge, does not have an effect.

Regarding osmotic stress, I want to write first here about how not to use it. Often, people will add salt when their fish are sick, thinking -- because they've seen it written on the Internet and the box of aquarium salt itself says it -- that this will reduce the osmotic stress of the water. Well, firstly, the fish have lived and adapted to the osmotic stress, the difference in osmotic pressures between their bodies and the surrounding water, their whole lives. They do not need to be relieved of it any more than we need to be relieved of the pressure, or the stress, of Earth's atmosphere pressing on us when we are sick. Secondly, the fish actually use that osmotic pressure to perform their regulatory functions.

Here is the promised discussion why the fish use the osmotic pressure and changes in hardness are much more important than changes in pH. We all know fish excrete ammonia as waste. Well, that is not quite 100% true, since fish actually excrete ammonium, NH4+, not ammonia, NH3. Their waste is in the ionic form. Also, fish excrete a large amount of that ammonium via their gills, over 80%. There is some excreted with their urine, but the majority is done via the gills.

It is important to know that they excrete the ionic form, because when they want to remove ammonia from their bodies two things occur. 1) Since there is very little or no ammonium in the surround water, the ammonia will diffuse preferentially out of the fish's body. Diffusion occurs down a concentration gradient. That is, it will leave the high concentration, in the fish's body, to go to the low concentration, the surrounding water. This is advantageous to the fish, since the ammonium wants to leave the body naturally, it doesn't have to expend any energy for this to occur. Nature does the work for it. 2) Since it excretes the ionic form of ammonium, NH4+, at the gills the fish has to maintain a charge balance. That is, since it loses a positive ion, it must pick up a positive ion to remain in balance. And the usual positive ion the fish picks up to keep the charge balance? Na+, ionic sodium. Sodium being among the most commonly dissolved minerals in the water. Fish can also use Ca2+ and other positive ions, like potassium, K+. And what is the main measurement we use to know how much positive ions are in the water? The hardness which measures the total amount of minerals in the water.

Note here, that there is two principles at work, diffusion down a gradient and a charge balance; these two principles can work together or can work against each other.

So, how do large changes in hardness affect the fish? Let's do some examples. Consider a fish that goes from high hardness water to low hardness water. The problem here is that low hardness water won't have as many positive ions available for ion exchange at the gills. That means the rate at which ammonium can leave the fish's body is severely hampered, especially compared to the water it was previously in. The fish's body had gotten used to being able to perform a certain rate of ion exchange with its surrounding water, and when it gets placed in water that has much lessor ion exchange capability it take the fish's body a while to re-adjust. And, meanwhile, the ammonium in the fish's body that cannot be exchanged as fast is building up -- poisoning the fish's body, actually. This is why large changes in hardness is tough on fish's body. In this case, the principle of the charge balance harms the fish.

Now, consider the opposite example. The fish goes from low hardness water to high hardness. In this case, the ammonium won't build up because there are ions available for exchange. But, in this case the principle of diffusion down a gradient is what will harm this fish. Because, the fish coming from low mineral content water will have lower mineral content in its system. So, when it is placed into high mineral content water, the minerals in the water are going to want to enter the fish's body. So some extent, that higher concentration of minerals are going to try to flood into the fish's body. Again, there is a period of readjustment that has to occur before the fish's bodies acclimate. This is why large changes in hardness is tough on fish's body.

In both cases, the fish can carry out its normal bodily functions, but they wll have to expend energy to perform their tasks. Like, in the first example, the fish can expend energy to expel the positive ion even though there are no other ions to exchange it with. The energy is expended in order to neutralize the NH4+ to turn it into NH3. In the second example, energy is expended to prevent the ions from flooding into the fish's system. In general, a fish will survive the second example better than the first. But both can be pretty stressful and should be avoided if possible.

Finally, experimental evidence shows that fish can change their internal pH's very quickly in response to pH changes in the environment. Data indicate that most fish's excrete a net acid flux of 10 to 100 micromol per kilogram per hour under control of steady acid-base conditions. Some back of the envelope calculations indicate that assuming the low number there, 10 micromol per kg per hour, that a small aquarium fish (I did it for a tiger barb) can change its pH over 4 units per hour. A larger fish is going to take a little longer, but the point remains the same, that a fish can change its pH very quickly. Again, this really is best evidenced by nature where the pH in lakes can change 2 units through the course of a day, and again the runoff during hard and fast rains.

This information is taken from the articles: Evans, Piermarini, and Choe, "The Multifunctional Fish Gill" Dominant Site of Gas Exchange, Osmoregulation, Acid-Base Regulation, and Excretion of Nitrogenous Waste", Physological Reviews Vol 85, 2005 and Claiborne, Edwards, and Morrison-Shetlar "Acid-Base Regulation in Fishes: Cellular and Molecular Mechanism", Journal of Experimental Zoology Vol 293, 2002

So, there you guys go. Please feel free to ask any questions, I am happy to answer them. But, as a synopsis of the research I presented above, it is the differences in the mineral content -- typically measured as hardness by home aquarists -- that is the real stressors for fish. It is typical that hard water has high pH and soft water has low pH, so I can understand how the connection was made between stress and pH. But, the experiments in the scientific literature just don't back that up. The scientific literature has much evidence that shows that difference in mineral content are much more important to a fish's biological processes, however."

edit: sp

 

[necrocanis]

Ok if you bothered to read what I wrote. I never suggest that you should use old water. In my suggestion I suggest using salt in addition to heat and 2 large water changes per week. I have never heard of any evidence or anyone who says that their freshwater fish were ever hurt from using the minimal amount of salt that I suggest. I for one have kept all my freshwater fish in a minimal salt level environment for years with no ill effect in fact all my fish act way more lively and eat more with a lil extra salt in their water. I will never go without it. All my tanks have been desiese free for years. So rather than go off of theory I will go off of my first hand expiriences. The other data that you provide is some good stuff. Thnx for doing research into that for us. Non the less I will continue to use salt and suggest it to others. Not as a means to keep away from water changes, but in effect to add to the effects of a water change. As I change my water I replace the salt that was taken out with the water. I keep almost exclusively catfish from the amazon and have yet in the past 12 years to see any side effects from keeping them with a lil salt and large weekly water changes. So believe what you like I have my own real life tanks to prove that salt works. Take a look through some of my threads. Since using salt I have never seen the growth rates that I expirience in my catfish. They are way more healthy than they were the first 3 years I kept fish and used no salt.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Ok if you bothered to read what I wrote. I never suggest that you should use old water. In my suggestion I suggest using salt in addition to heat and 2 large water changes per week. I have never heard of any evidence or anyone who says that their freshwater fish were ever hurt from using the minimal amount of salt that I suggest. I for one have kept all my freshwater fish in a minimal salt level environment for years with no ill effect in fact all my fish act way more lively and eat more with a lil extra salt in their water. I will never go without it. All my tanks have been desiese free for years. So rather than go off of theory I will go off of my first hand expiriences. The other data that you provide is some good stuff. Thnx for doing research into that for us. Non the less I will continue to use salt and suggest it to others. Not as a means to keep away from water changes, but in effect to add to the effects of a water change. As I change my water I replace the salt that was taken out with the water. I keep almost exclusively catfish from the amazon and have yet in the past 12 years to see any side effects from keeping them with a lil salt and large weekly water changes. So believe what you like I have my own real life tanks to prove that salt works. Take a look through some of my threads. Since using salt I have never seen the growth rates that I expirience in my catfish. They are way more healthy than they were the first 3 years I kept fish and used no salt.

I did bother to read your post, but the point i was making about old water was that i was explaining to you (since i was doing an in-depth post on salt use and more) where the whole salt use on freshwater aquarium fish thing originated from, which is a rather dogey and unscientific background in the murky early days of fishkeeping.


Most of the catfish you keep like your RTC are very tough/hardy fish, which i'm sure you will agree with.
The problem with this is that fish like RTC have been known to tolerate some really appalling conditions without showing any obvious physical symptoms. However just because the fish is not showing any obvious negative symptoms from the salt use on the outside, does not mean that the salt is not causing the fish any stress internally.

RTC are no different from any other freshwater fish from the Amazon when it comes to osmotic stress and salt use and stuff, its just that you are not as likely to see the ill effects of salt use on RTC as you would with a very fragile/sensitive fish like Disus. Same goes for ammonia- Discus tend to drop dead at the slightest sign of ammonia, while RTC can often tolerate it for quite a while before they die or show any obvious ill effects of it.
However that doesn't mean that ammonia is any less bad for RTC than it is for Discus, and this also applys to salt too.
Fish like RTC also live a heck of a lot longer than Discus, so you are less likely to see the long term effects on the fishes life expectancy on RTC than you would with a fish like Discus.
What would you do if your 17year old RTC died one day, and you found out that if you had not made its internal organs endure years of salt treatments, the RTC would have lived another 5, even 10, years longer?

So basically, just because there doesn't appear to be anything obviously wrong with the RTC on the outside, doesn't mean that it isn't in any discomfort.
For example I've seen people keep huge goldfish in 10gallon tanks for years, and the goldfish have looked healthy enough even though logic would say that a 10gallon tank would not be good for a large goldfish. But just because the goldfish appears to be healthy on the outside, does that mean the owner should not be concerned about the fishes inner health just because the fishes isn't showing any obvious external symptoms?

What do you disagree with the science and facts i gave you in my previous post?
Or is this just another case of "i've done this for years with my fish and I haven't noticed anything wrong with them" sort of thing? Which would then make you not a great deal more different than all the people who keep brackish puffers in freshwater tanks, or people who keep goldfish in bowls, or people who have very badly chosen tankmates for their fish which are always stressing each other out- and all of these people do these wrong things because they haven't personally noticed anything wrong with their fish, despite accepted fact/science saying they are not treating their fish right? Perhaps you shouldn't judge others then when they keep fish in less than ideal conditions because in their experience they think they're doing the right thing regardless of other people's advice.
How can you now say you are no different from those people?

(i appologise if i appear a bit on the offence, but this is a topic i feel strongly about, soo...)

edit: Oh another thing, with your fish being healthier now than the ones you kept in the first 3years of fishkeeping, have you not considered that that is down to the fact that you know more about your fish and how to look after them better now than what you did when you first started keeping fish? IMHO, that would be the most obvious reason for it, not the salt.

 

[toehead11183]

yes, my madton got his chewed off by my ACs and they grew back. only to be eaten off again

 

[mcox3]

I've read that RTC can loose they're feelers when large water changes are done... They say 15% WC should be the max.

 

[necrocanis]

I did bother to read your post, but the point i was making about old water was that i was explaining to you (since i was doing an in-depth post on salt use and more) where the whole salt use on freshwater aquarium fish thing originated from, which is a rather dogey and unscientific background in the murky early days of fishkeeping.


Most of the catfish you keep like your RTC are very tough/hardy fish, which i'm sure you will agree with.
The problem with this is that fish like RTC have been known to tolerate some really appalling conditions without showing any obvious physical symptoms. However just because the fish is not showing any obvious negative symptoms from the salt use on the outside, does not mean that the salt is not causing the fish any stress internally.

RTC are no different from any other freshwater fish from the Amazon when it comes to osmotic stress and salt use and stuff, its just that you are not as likely to see the ill effects of salt use on RTC as you would with a very fragile/sensitive fish like Disus. Same goes for ammonia- Discus tend to drop dead at the slightest sign of ammonia, while RTC can often tolerate it for quite a while before they die or show any obvious ill effects of it.
However that doesn't mean that ammonia is any less bad for RTC than it is for Discus, and this also applys to salt too.
Fish like RTC also live a heck of a lot longer than Discus, so you are less likely to see the long term effects on the fishes life expectancy on RTC than you would with a fish like Discus.
What would you do if your 17year old RTC died one day, and you found out that if you had not made its internal organs endure years of salt treatments, the RTC would have lived another 5, even 10, years longer?

So basically, just because there doesn't appear to be anything obviously wrong with the RTC on the outside, doesn't mean that it isn't in any discomfort.
For example I've seen people keep huge goldfish in 10gallon tanks for years, and the goldfish have looked healthy enough even though logic would say that a 10gallon tank would not be good for a large goldfish. But just because the goldfish appears to be healthy on the outside, does that mean the owner should not be concerned about the fishes inner health just because the fishes isn't showing any obvious external symptoms?

What do you disagree with the science and facts i gave you in my previous post?
Or is this just another case of "i've done this for years with my fish and I haven't noticed anything wrong with them" sort of thing? Which would then make you not a great deal more different than all the people who keep brackish puffers in freshwater tanks, or people who keep goldfish in bowls, or people who have very badly chosen tankmates for their fish which are always stressing each other out- and all of these people do these wrong things because they haven't personally noticed anything wrong with their fish, despite accepted fact/science saying they are not treating their fish right? Perhaps you shouldn't judge others then when they keep fish in less than ideal conditions because in their experience they think they're doing the right thing regardless of other people's advice.
How can you now say you are no different from those people?

(i appologise if i appear a bit on the offence, but this is a topic i feel strongly about, soo...)

edit: Oh another thing, with your fish being healthier now than the ones you kept in the first 3years of fishkeeping, have you not considered that that is down to the fact that you know more about your fish and how to look after them better now than what you did when you first started keeping fish? IMHO, that would be the most obvious reason for it, not the salt.

I like your argument, and when I have some more time later this week I'll do some more in depth research into it. For now though I will keep the salt levels in all my tanks where they are now. I know that my fish are better kept now than the first three years because of my growth of knowledge, but I have yet to have a severely sick fish since I've been using salt so before I will ever do away with it I will have to do some serious research into the matter. you shouldn't take offense because this is an open forum and new information should be either validated or proven wrong before it is dissmissed so I appologize to you for not looking further into it before I took offense myself. So tnx for bringing some more light into salt use, and I will be doing more research into it. I think sometimes I do more research into the fish themselves sometimes versus their environment so it's very noteworthy and worth a look.

 

[necrocanis]

I've read that RTC can loose they're feelers when large water changes are done... They say 15% WC should be the max.

I have only ever done large scale water changes, and never lost a whisker due to it. They do however start to erode in high ammonia environments. This is usually the forebearer to fin and tail rot. At least catfish have their barbells are physical indicators for us. If they rot away you may want to look at your water conditions in depth.