Can I use peices of shells in an aquarium that have been colected from the beach? They are mostly just smoothed fragments of shells.
Beach Shells
- Thread starter Zeetrain
- Start date
There is no safe way to incorporate shells and rocks from the beach into a freshwater tank. They will always be leaching minerals into your water, which will raise your pH. Some people do use crushed coral (probably similar to your beach shells/stones) in a FW tank specifically to raise the pH, but they are usually raising the pH or keeping stable a higher pH for fish like African cichlids.
If am not mistaken can't fish (or most fish) tolerate any pH range? If adapted correctly? So if you use it during cycling and acclimate prop I don't see a problem. I may be wrong tho...
I use shells in most of my tanks with no ill effects. i have even bred many fish with them in there. I dont really see the problem, unless the said fish were acidic water fish in which case i would agree it would be a bad idea.
It would go into a future saltwater tank. FFrom what ive read they ussually have a high ph around 8 anyways. I was just wondering if it would be ok for a saltwater tank not freshwater.
Zeetrain;5019794; said:
You should not have any problem putting the shells in. They won't really affect ph much at all and even if they did it wouldn't be harmful in a saltwater tank. Just make sure you sterilize and clean them well before putting them in the tank.
I would just boil. Dont use bleach unless you have to...best to keep all things like that away from the aquarium.