I am wondering what PH you keep your tank at? The other day I accidentally drained the tank farther than I meant to during a water change (3" of water in tank) and as a result my PH ended up at 7.5 when it is normally 7.1 after a water change. Unfortunately I lost one of my elephant nose I'm not sure what happened to it. However I noticed my bichirs were a lot more active afterwards. Any Ideas?
What is your PH
- Thread starter thefredpit
- Start date
Sorry that your fish died. In our aquariums, the pH is slowly, gradually lowered by fish urine. The best way to avoid swings caused by this is to do large and frequent enough water changes that the water in the tank is nearly the same pH as comes out of the tap. If your pH is swinging after water changes, I would ask how often, and what percent, of water you change in the tank. You probably will want to boost it until your pH stays around 7.5 before and after water change.
A possibility is higher chlorine / chloramine levels from the tap. Just so it's safe to drink for humanoids in your city. Don't think it was the PH increase causing issues.
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I do 50-70% water changes every 5-7 days
that was one thought, my other thoughts were
1. one of the larger fish freaked out and rammed him since he couldn't go vertical to get out of the way
2. temperature shock because it takes about 15-30 seconds to get the temp adjusted right and this one was on the side of tank where I was adding water
my other 3 elephant nose were fine
Agree. I doubt it was ph related. I dont remember what my ph is but i do mkre than fin level wcs. In the past 2 or 3 times per week.
Sorry about the elephant nose. Are they hardy or on the delicate side?
elephant nose can be on the delicate size but a lot of that has to do with them not getting enough food because of their tiny mouths
7.8 here.
Did not know about the fish urine. Cool! Would a pH change of 0.4 be enough to cause a death though? I know inverts are very sensitive to pH, but would this cause problems for scaleless fish? I think elephant noses are scaleless, but I could be wrong.