High Ph and HITH/ pitting

[LBDave]

A lot has been said about high ph contributing to HITH disease. Has anyone tried this ph buffer from Seachem?
SEACHEM Discus Buffer.
I am posting this in general section as I don't want to confine to a specific breed but I realize it pertains mostly to SA cichlids.
My water is also pretty hard but is this stuff worth a shot? Will it hurt/ shock the fish?
duanes
Rocksor
RD.

 

[Sinister-Kisses]

I've never used it, but I will say this - trying to FORCE water conditions that are not "natural" for you is usually a really terrible idea. If you don't actually have water in your home/location that is suitable for SA cichlids, without throwing a bunch of chemicals and treatments at it, then IMO you should be looking to stock your tanks with fish that DO like the conditions you have instead. Screwing around with trying to alter what you've actually got to be something it's not is just not often a really great idea.

 

[duanes]

The thing, ''' is problems may not solely be about pH alone, but all the other parameters that are divorced from low pH water that contribute.
Conductivity, hardness, and other minerals, all contribute to hard water soup
Although that buffer may be worth an experiment.
The problem with the experiment, could be time.
It often takes 2 years or more for the chronic effects of hard, high pH water to present.
HITH often doesn't show its ugly head in oscars, or other long lived S American species until age 2 or 3.

Low pH water dwelling fish are not just living in a low pH soup, with the constant rains, and all the rain forest plants sucking up minerals and nutrients, they live in a very low mineral component broth, and its not just the osmotic pressure, or lack thereof for higher animals.
Its a broth, that doesn't allow certain bacteria to survive in it, so the soft water fish never need to build up resistance to those species, so it may not just be pH, but all those other components in hard water that may contribute to hard water species of bacteria.

One reason that RO/DI works so well, is that it removes almost everything from water, it just doesn't just drop the pH.

I check the pH of my rain water here in Panama, and it tests out at pH 8, and sometimes even higher during the rainy season, so even with Panamas surrounding jungle, minerals are not totally stripped and the surrounding rivers and lake waters pH remain high.

Not saying the buffer is not worth a shot.

 

[Trouser Cough]

I'm a huge fan of better living through chemistry however, when it comes to pH buffering and adjustment I just say no. My pH runs around 8.2-9 depending on season and seismic activity and there may be some bugs in my water that my stock has no natural immunity toward so...

I irradiate my water w/ UV. No unwanted bacteria, no parasites, no nonsense of any kind survives a few trips through a big sterilizer. To some degree I think it's the least I can do to make my artificial environment safer for some of the species that aren't from similar water columns. On a related topic I've never noticed that pH (outside of the unnatural pathogen element) significantly impacts fish. I've always assumed it to be a parameter that they might not care for but that isn't damaging. Something like me moving from dry country to Houston, TX or similar. The humidity might be annoying but beyond that, eh.

If you're thinking about UV sterilizers for this or other applications avoid the black plastic cased models despite the fact that they may occasionally seem like a smoking deal. The stainless steel units have a much higher interior reflectance factor.

 

[jjohnwm]

Threads like this make me somewhat worried, what with all this talk of artificial chemical buffers and radiation. Other threads show us banks of electronic gizmos festooned with flashing LED's...mysterious bubbling gadgets infusing the water with CO2 (the very thing which we have frantically been aerating our tanks to remove for most of my life)...light fixtures that need to be programmed so that they can imitate moonlight and lightning flashes and solar eclipses..."reactor chambers" to remove various toxins...reverse osmosis machines turning hundreds of gallons of perfectly good water into dozens of gallons of supposedly slightly better water...and of course mysterious bearded gnomes exhorting us to keep our tanks as filthy as possible to maintain high levels of beneficial nitrates!

Dang...I think I've been doing this wrong all along...

 

[LBDave]

The thing is problems may not solely be about pH alone, but all the other parameters that are divorced from low pH water that contribute.
Conductivity, hardness, and other minerals, all contribute to hard water soup
Although that buffer may be worth an experiment.
The problem with the experiment, could be time.
It often takes 2 years or more for the chronic effects of hard, high pH water to present.
HITH often doesn't show its ugly head in oscars, or other long lived S American species until age 2 or 3.

Low pH water dwelling fish are not just living in a low pH soup, with the constant rains, and all the rain forest plants sucking up minerals and nutrients, they live in a very low mineral component broth, and its not just the osmotic pressure, or lack thereof for higher animals.
Its a broth, that doesn't allow certain bacteria to survive in it, so the soft water fish never need to build up resistance to those species, so it may not just be pH, but all those other components in hard water that may contribute to hard water species of bacteria.

One reason that RO/DI works so well, is that it removes almost everything from water, it just doesn't just drop the pH.

I check the pH of my rain water here in Panama, and it tests out at pH 8, and sometimes even higher during the rainy season, so even with Panamas surrounding jungle, minerals are not totally stripped and the surrounding rivers and lake waters pH remain high.

Not saying the buffer is not worth a shot.

I gave a shout out (email)to Seachem to see what they think. Their dosing instructions are for RO water. Also want to make sure I don't shock the fish. Just really frustrated. One of my pbass has lots of pitting. Food and water parameters are all good.
My other bass got this pitting about a year and a half ago. But it stopped and she has had no affect since.
Have used meds but not sure it is stopping it. May have arrested it to a small degree for short time.
Wish I had room to do RO water.

 

[LBDave]

I gave a shout out (email)to Seachem to see what they think. Their dosing instructions are for RO water. Also want to make sure I don't shock the fish. Just really frustrated. One of my pbass has lots of pitting. Food and water parameters are all good.
My other bass got this pitting about a year and a half ago. But it stopped and she has had no affect since.
Have used meds but not sure it is stopping it. May have arrested it to a small degree for short time.
Wish I had room to do RO water.

Also, FYI, pbass are 4 1/2 years old.

 

[Trouser Cough]

mysterious bearded gnomes exhorting us to keep our tanks as filthy as possible to maintain high levels of beneficial nitrates!

I hear you. I prefer low tech for my own stuff though I don't mind an occasional blinking light. For me the problems start when a member within the hobby transitions from experimenting for a better artificial environment to spouting disinformation. The gnome represents the latter.

Manufacturers in our industry are in the fish hobbyist business trying to make a profit.

The gnome is in the profit business trying to attract fish hobbyists.

One of these things is not like the other.

 

[duanes]

I gave a shout out (email)to Seachem to see what they think. Their dosing instructions are for RO water. Also want to make sure I don't shock the fish. Just really frustrated. One of my pbass has lots of pitting. Food and water parameters are all good.
My other bass got this pitting about a year and a half ago. But it stopped and she has had no affect since.
Have used meds but not sure it is stopping it. May have arrested it to a small degree for short time.
Wish I had room to do RO water.

This is the key.
These buffers are there to properly "add" and to mimic to the soup already present in soft water removed by RO, not to remove stuff.
Makes much more sense with that info.

The one other important factor in aquarium water "soup", that contributes to things like HITH is nitrate.
For years it's been accepted that elevated nitrate is almost harmless, some even tout 40 ppm is OK.
The thing is, in most healthy natural systems nitrate is minimal, because along with those other minerals, it is used as food by plants (aquatic and terrestrial), almost as fast as its produced.
I just spent a week collecting in rivers in Panama, where I tested for and found nitrate was undetectable..


If these are typical nitrate reading in nature, draw your own conclusions about what nitrate level should be in our tanks.

 

[Something Fishy Here]

Would UV sterilizers prevent HITH as Trouser Bark suggests? is that all it would take to keep SA fish in most North American tap water?