Botanicals with bichirs and oscars?
- Thread starter Kelly_Aquatics
- Start date
Hmm... bio load can be handled by powerful filter but will oscars try to eat bichir? One hurt him he will be about their size
Not for life just I want to know that will oscars hurt bichir or consider him as food?
What kind of bichir? It really depends on species and the individual Oscar. Either way, you only have a month or two before the oscars put on enough size to max out that tank, then you are gonna need almost 250-300 gallons to keep them all.
A 68 galtank, is barely enough room for 1 oscar, let alone 4 and a bichir.
And on using leaves, if your KH (related to alkalinity)is high, the higher it is, the more it buffers pH (the more it stabilizes and holds it at an equilibrium level).
Seasonally, my tank gets a ton of tannins when the rainy season starts as tannins are leached into the tank from the surrounding foliage.
Enough so, that pH drops from 7.8 to about 7, but to do this, the tannins are so thick, you can barely see the back of the tank, and rain water usually has minimal buffering capacity, so pH can drop.
as you can see, for tannins to significantly alter pH, the water must look like tea, and or have minimal buffering capacity.
The jug above is filled with tank water, at peak tannin season.
As the season wears on, and the tannins are depleted from the foliage, the water clears and pH again inches its way up with daily water changes.
During the high tannin time, many of aquatic the plants melted back
The photos above were a few months ago today, water is slowly becoming much clearer, and plants are regrowing.
A few leaves will not make much of a difference (as mentioned above), using something like compacted peat moss that you can buy in large bags, and add to filters or the tank is much more effective.
When in the states, I would collect enough leaves in the fall, to fill a couple 50 gallon barrels, and soak in the barrels, then remove to 5 gallon buckets, soak some more, and to add the dark water to my soft water species tanks.
I would add the brown water with water changes, but also cover the substrate of certain tanks with leaf litter.
In this way my pH might drop a 10th or 2in larger tanks, but that's because the tap water in the US, always had significant alkalinity (buffering capacity).
The upside beyond simply dropping pH, is the tannins have an anti-bacterial effect, for those species whose immunity is compromised in hard water.
I was even able to get certain killifish to spawn in the leaf litter in small tanks of about 20 gallons.
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Filters do not do anything for nitrates. You need to do water changes to keep nitrates below 20ppm. A single 10" oscar requires at least 60 gallons of water changed a week.
