Coryd55

I have noticed many people locally and on forums not properly acclimating their fish, which can lead to many problems. For that reason I have created this guide - this is how I acclimate my fish, some of you may not agree with the way I do it but I am just sharing what has worked for me. That being said, enjoy!

If I am going to take time and do something, I believe there should be a good reason for doing it. So, I am going to list the two main reasons that you should acclimate your fish.

To prevent stress and shock to the fish
Fish are very sensitive to change and have very acute senses that can detect the slightest change in pressure, water quality, etc. Many people will just take home the fish and dump the fish in the tank, this is wrong for a couple of reasons - I will go over the others shortly. When you take a fish from the fish store or even a friends house, it is nearly impossible that you have the exact same parameters - temperature, ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, pH, kH, etc. By slowly getting the fish used to your water conditions, acclimation, you will prevent any stress or shock to the fish.

To prevent dirty water from infecting your system
Let's face it: Fish store water is nasty. No matter how nice the people are, how large the store is, how clean the tanks look, it just isn't the kind of water you want entering your system. Just like the new fish you are bringing home, the current fish and system(tank) in general are sensitive to changes in the water. When you bring home a bag of fish and you look at the water, its not Perrier, its pretty nasty water. So this is why when you acclimate your fish, you should not just dump the water in even if you just float them. This will introduce all of the bad bacteria from the fish store and could possibly crash your tank and kill all of your fish.

Now that we have been over the reasons to acclimate, we need to go over how to acclimate. Many of you are accustomed to floating the bag for fifteen minutes and dumping the fish. This is wrong, contrary to what the fish store tells you. Equalizing the temperature helps but there are other parameters that need to be as close to equal as possible as well - pH, kH, nitrite, nitrate, ammonia, etc. You cannot achieve an almost equal water quality by just floating the bag. This is impossible. There are three different ways that I have used and know of when acclimating a fish; the floating bag, the bucket, and the drip.

In the next three posts these methods will be described and demonstrated.

recidivist

Awesome. Cant wait.

P.S. Does this count as post 1?

sgould

Yup.

Great post so far, Coryd!

CAS512

this will be interesting can this be post 3??

Slug

Good idea, and i'm sure it will be a good guide. Its always a good thing to learn and is about the same amount of work as just floating the bag so why wouldn't you do it? Looking forward to the rest of it.

SkyCrystal

Awesome job! Can't wait for the rest!

-SkyCrystal

P.S. I do mine by floating the bag for 15 min, adding a bit of my water into the bag, floating it for 5 minutes, adding more, wait 5 minutes, net the fish into my tank. Voila!

lauriekingsley

have I missed the next three posts somehow? I want to buy a few otto cats, but the last pair I bought died within a week and I want to make sure I don't have to go through that again, so this topic is of great interest to me.