how to acclimate your fish??

Interesting - do you have any article you can point us to? I'd be interested to read up on that. I wonder if it's an anectdotal type thing where they might perform 90% of their adjustment in short time (an hour or so) but then they take a disproportionately long time to adjust the final 10%???
It would be interesting to look into . . .

 

Completely agree

You how if you put a frog in water and then put the water on heat to bring it to a boil the frog won't try to leave? But if you put the frog in hot water right off the bat it will immediately try to vacate?

It's acclimating to it enough, but not so much it survives ;D

I think the same with our little fish temp float acclimation. It's body might not be acclimated to the temp, but it's one thing to bring the surrounding temp up slowly (float) than it is to just dump them into water of several degrees difference.

Either way they'll take time to fully acclimate, but only one of those ways is a *shock*

 

Not true. They actually did a study on this.

 

I don't agree.

The study showed when the were thrown in a different temp, they produced the stress hormone. 30 minutes and a couple hours acclimation produced the stress hormone. A couple of days acclimation.... very low stress hormone. The sudden dip and the 2 hour acclimation showed the same levels.... so both of those ways are an equal shock.

 

These are aquacullture books .... some are over a 1000 pages a piece.

Lemme get some titles for ya... brb.

K, One of my favs is Fish Welfare edited by
Edward J. Branson
MRCVS, Veterinary Surgeon,
RCVS Specialist in Fish Health and Production,
Monmouthshire, United Kingdom

Put out for the Veterinary Society by Blackwell Publishing.

 

good for "they". I've done mine own test and I stand by it. Froggy got boiled. It just kept its eyes above the water line. It moved around, but it didn't do any hopping or 'standing' on the side.

There's nothing in the linked article that actually disproves this.

Froggy in this case is probably actually a toad - it'd be the ones I would always find in the house water tap box by the street. I don't really know what the species there is. They pee when you pick them up though!

Can you link to the study? Just going off what you said.... I'm not saying a 15 minute acclimation will not produce stress hormone. But I don't see anywhere that says the same amount of hormone was produced in a 30 minute float as was in just dumping. And I don't see anywhere mentioning the temp difference in this study.

I'm quite sure it produces the *same* hormone no matter the stress. There is more than temp acclimation going on here.


temp has an impact on SG. By not temp acclimating you are (generally) going to have a more severe SG swing - which I think could account for some stress too. It's this reason that keeps me floating these guys and why I find the drip method to be counter productive (unless you're dripping and floating at same time)

 

I just temp acclimate all my livestock, unless an e-tailer says otherwise. I haven't lost a single organism through this.

 

Also, on the boil a frog thing... as the link is extremely vague and the references in the link are also uninformative, let me further clarify.


There's a difference between putting a frog in a pan and putting that on the fire. The bottom gets very hot to the feet.

For me, I used one of those melting pots. The fire doesn't touch the pan, but the pan under. The bottom pan has water to boil. This, in turn, heats the top pan. You use it to melt chocolate and things like that. That's what I used.

Doesn't say which way "they" did it in this "study". But I do not agree it's been disproved - not by that link anyway.

 

It may be that toads are different from frogs in regard to water temperature. Toads are, after all, adapted to dry habitats, whereas frogs are adapted to wet habitats. Just look at their skin.

From the article, words of Victor H Hutchison, with specialization in amphibians, and a particular (and peculiar!) research interest in "The physiological ecology of thermal relations of amphibians and reptiles to include determinations of the factors which influence lethal temperatures, critical thermal maxima and minima, thermal selection, and thermoregulatory behavior.":

"The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so."

Now, Wikipedia mentions that there was a study done over 100 years ago, where the temperature was raised extremely slowly, something like 0.2C per minute, and that worked. Nobody's repeated the study, so it's uncertain. Quite a few have repeated the faster heatups (2C + per minute) and the frogs have jumped.

 

I do the same thing. If it is an invert, or sensitive fish/coral (or the fish appears half dead), I will temp acclimate and then put some of my tank water into the bag every few minutes for 15 minutes or so. But if they aren't super sensitive, I just float for 20 minutes and then put them in.