I would say add a little bit, it will help prevent large swings in your pH. Nitrifying bacteria have a hard time working at pHs under 6.0.
are CA ,SA fussy with hardness?
- Thread starter jagsandpits
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This is why keeping soft water fish is hard because of the swing in pH. More soft water fish are killed by low pH swing than high pH. Succesful Discus keepers do water change daily to stablize the pH yet not adding hardness. So unless you have soft tap water to begin with, you have to deligently make RO water to be successful with soft water fish.
If you are asking a general question. Unless you are geting wild cought fish it doesn't matter too much. Tank raised fish have adopted to the water they were born in. I have seen Discus kept in water Mbuana would love. Even wild fish can be acclamated over time to different water conditions then what they are used to, I takes time and a little skill but it can be done. The question "are they fussy" the answer is thay can be, some more than others. If changing water chemistry the the trick is slow and steady. One important thing to remember is fish will do much better in a steady consistant environment than if you try to constantly adjust the water chemistry, that is almost always a recipie for disaster. If your keeping or buying tank raised fish from your area I wouldn't worry about it too much. Like I said the worst thing you could do is trying to adjust your water chemistry to a level you can not maintane. Fish from your LFS will more then likely already be acclamated to your water so is shouldn't be an issue. Another thing is ask questions about the water the fish you are getting are kept in so you know what to expect and how best to acclamate them. HTH.
This is just me, but all in all I've found a happy medium that works for most fish, which is pH in the low to mid 7s and moderate hardness of 10 or 12-14 degrees (both GH and KH). I've kept all manner of rift lake Africans (including breeding Kapampa fronts) and a variety of SA fish this way, including some geo species and guianacara. Have a 12-13 year old wild rotkeil severum (possibly older) that still looks good at that age, so it's obviously done well in these conditions and not shortened its life span as some would suggest. Also have a wild L260 pleco that's at least 10 years old, and some wild Peruvian scalare that are also doing well (don't know their age). Have also had discus do well in similar conditions. (In the past I've kept some wild green terrors, but as already mentioned they don't come from soft water, anyway.)
As mentioned above, beneficial bacteria are going to be more active in pH over 7 and it's less work to keep stable conditions ime-- there was a time with keeping discus that I had did them in lower pH, but eventually found they did just as well in neutral or mid 7s pH. (The thing with discus is not all of them come from low pH in the wild, it depends which type.)
As mentioned above, beneficial bacteria are going to be more active in pH over 7 and it's less work to keep stable conditions ime-- there was a time with keeping discus that I had did them in lower pH, but eventually found they did just as well in neutral or mid 7s pH. (The thing with discus is not all of them come from low pH in the wild, it depends which type.)
Raising discus in hard water is fine, but breeding them will not be successful because the eggs will not hatch. Same problem with cardinal tetra and dwarf cichlids from black water tributaries of Amazon basin. On the other hand, many Tetra species have been successfully bred in Florida fish farms where the water is hard. So it depends on the fish and whether they are given the chance to evolve in domestication. I have kept Discus and Geos for a few years and they all survived but came up with HITH and I attributed it to water chemistry because my hard water fish never developed HITH.
Not all Geos came from soft water. A few species originate from neutral to hard water regions outside the Amazon Basin.
Not all soft water fish are the same. The really difficult fish to keep are the black water species that came from water with no mearurable hardless and pH betweem 4 to 6.
http://fish.mongabay.com/biotope_amazon_blackwater.htm
The reason Appistogramma cichlids, dispite their diversity of species and color, have not been popularized is their demand for extreme water chemistry.
Not all soft water fish are the same. The really difficult fish to keep are the black water species that came from water with no mearurable hardless and pH betweem 4 to 6.
http://fish.mongabay.com/biotope_amazon_blackwater.htm
The reason Appistogramma cichlids, dispite their diversity of species and color, have not been popularized is their demand for extreme water chemistry.
my ph is 7.5 and my gh/kh is around 3 wich is wierd but i mean not that im bragging or think that its right but i recall owning a green terror in my 30 gal when i was 11 or so , i didnt even know what a cycle was or a proper water change, the fish wer always in very poor crowded conditions, once in a awile i wud do a complete water change with no conditioner and whats amazing is i managed to raise a beautiful green terror that hit 6 inches in less than a year he was really nice and lively and aggressive so i mean who knows . u guys are prob right in the fact that the fish will acclimate but i do have a large bag of crushed coral should i rinse it and gradually add a little into my media bags in the filter at a time?
