Are Water Changes Actually Necessary?

[xsdbs]

I apologize but it's hard to try to read thru all this, so may I ask a question? Is this conversation for both saltwater and freshwater tanks. if for saltwater also then why does my water get dingy looking if I don't do a water change in a timely manner and my corals as well as fish act differently. Also I start to get brown gunk in the sand that clears up after I do a water change. ( not here for the argument just the information)

 

[Fishfriend1]

And that's why it's good that most places don't have "animal cruelty" laws that include fish. Because people are determined to impose their ignorance on everyone else.

Sounds like you kaz.:lol:

 

[eddiebait]

I've skimmed over most of the posts in this thread. An interesting thread for sure. In my previous life as an aquarium keeper (several years ago) I rather enjoyed water change time, it made total sense to me, and it gave me a chance to fuss with other details in the tank. I for one have not been convinced to not do water changes.

 

[Reefscape]

Well, i am on page 19, and i have STILL YET TO SEE YOUR ( directed specifically at the post OP ) documented evidence which backs up why your arguing your point in this thread...Its been asked for many times now for you to produce this, yet these posts are being disregarded by you. If your not going to post your documented evidence, then i suggest you start listening, rather than arguing / disregarding what members have stated in this thread..

 

[chefjamesscott]

I just wanted to come back to say I am sorry if I offended anyone with that which I posted but I stand by everything I have posted.

 

[platytudes]

What is concerning me, right now, is the realization that trillions of fish out in the wild suffer from not interacting with people on a regular basis.

How can we do this to them? We all need to don SCUBA gear right now!

Oh, wait, that's right, I'm anthropomorphizing. In fact, fish don't need to interact with people AT ALL. They can feel normally stimulated without it.

Actually, I meant why do YOU keep an aquarium if you don't interact with it? Because I assumed that if you were too busy to change water or feed it more than 2 times in 168 hours for a year and a half, that you were not interacting with it. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

In the wild, fish constantly graze. So to feed them 2 times in 168 hours a highly concentrated, low fiber dried food is in no way a suitable replacement for their natural diet...even if you researched it and found that the average fish in the wild eats about as many calories in a week as 2 servings of rich flake food.

You are right that fish food manufacturers tell you to feed the fish way too much so you will run out faster. Shampoos and conditioners say to rinse and repeat, does anyone really do that? But your feeding regimen is in no way what's best for the fish.

Let's see these vigorous, impressive fish of yours after 3 years with no water changes and twice weekly feedings of stale flake food...:uhoh:

(Since I'm sure you're going to say next that you've used the same giant can of Wardley's for the entire 3 years, since flake food doesn't really get stale...that's just some conspiracy theory from United Pet Group)

 

[SubRosa]

There is a simple, one word, scientific reason to do water changes. Entropy. Look up the definition yourself.

 

[kazvorpal]

Ok, Kaz, it seems to me you are arguing two different things. Sometimes you say that it is foolish to do water changes at specific intervals - the equivalent of superstition. Other times, you say that it is not necessary to change water, period.

I have said that I had a community tank go 3 years with no water changes, and not a single death aside from a five year old molly. That does not mean that no water changes are ever necessary, period.

I am specifically arguing against set-interval water changes being described as an absolute rule, especially with some precise minimum interval mentioned. I have said, from the beginning, that specific changes for specific reasons can be necessary.

Weekly W/Cs are now recommended because most people have greater success with their fish keeping when they change water more frequently than before, in the days where UGF, activated carbon and salt were must haves. (I suspect that most people casually keeping fish actually change their tank's water more like every 2-3 weeks on average, but this is pure speculation on my part.)

UGF as a reason not to need to change water as often?

You seem to be under the impression that under-gravel filters are BETTER for tanks, and that we've all stopped using them (OK, I never used them, I knew better) because we got lazy and are settling for lesser things.

In fact, the consensus seems to be that UGF are inferior, overall, to many of the other methods we now use. If anything, people who use those probably should change their water MORE often.

The reason being that most casual fish keepers overstock and overfeed their tanks. "Dilution is the solution to pollution" is the old adage - it's the simplest, most cost effective way to keep a tank balanced, a FW tank particularly.

Overfeeding clearly is rampant, including among some of the people on here, who are offended by tales of regular, but infrequent, feedings, and think it makes fish lonely.

But, in fact, I suspect that the more likely one is to overfeed and (truly) overstock a tank, the less likely one is to take regular water changes seriously.

Should everyone do weekly W/Cs? Not necessarily. No argument there. But...

And yet much of the list is people adamantly insisting that you MUST change your water weekly, at the very minimum, without regard to the tank specifics.

Are you *really* arguing that W/Cs are not good for fish? That they, as you say, "stress" them? Do you really think that cories don't mind swimming in their poop?

You really need to talk to a marine biologist about bottom feeders.

Because the bottom of a riverbed is not, as you say, "mostly poop" - there aren't blue whales in the riverbeds pooping in there. The bottom of a riverbed is not mostly made of poop.

A pond would be a better example of "mostly poop", but in fact you wouldn't need a blue whale to produce the waste needed. That slime that lines a large percentage of bodies of water is, indeed, waste products from living things. Again, you guys are projecting the sterile lives of humans onto the world at large.

And most FW fish are definitely not brackish, as you assert. At the pet store, they are very often kept in salty water (Petco and Petsmart all recommend and use "aquarium salt" in their tanks) so an extended salt period is obviously not fatal to them. But is it harmful? Yes, I believe it is. But that's a whole 'nother thread.

The use aquarium salt because it's good for the fish. Actually keeping the fish in healthy conditions would cost them too much, but the improvement gained by simply adding salt is tremendous, leaving it cost-effective.

Any biologist working in fresh water can tell you that, because it is comprised mainly of runoff, most "fresh" water bodies do, indeed, contain a noteworthy amount of salt. Rivers less than ponds, where evaporation concentrates the salts that are UNIVERSAL to runoff, but everywhere to some extent.

There are certainly a few fish in the world that evolved where the concentration hasn't built up much, and so they're sensitive to very salty water. The rest are more at home with some salt, than with none.

 

[pinkertd]

...the cory swims in poop, though, because he doesn't care, because that's what he does in the wild. People seem to get the delusion that all fish evolved to be in nice, pristine water conditions. In fact, bottom-feeders are specifically evolved to be in messy, dirty, muddy water. It may even be better for them....

Bwahahaha! Mostly, I try to treat what people say seriously, but that's just too goofy.

Many catfish live, in the wild, in brackish water, even salt water. Many other scale-less fish live in brackish water, even marine salt water. What, do you think that life evolved in fresh water, and then had to evolve scales to protect it from salt water?

In fact, only SOME corys (and no loaches that I know of) are sensitive to moderate salinity, and only because they evolved in abnormally low-salt conditions. MOST "fresh" water is at least somewhat brackish. ...
QUOTE]

You are way off base with your understanding of what type of water cories (and many freshwater fish species) are found in and your understanding of what type of an aquarium envirnment to replicate to meet their needs. For example, taken from Wikipedia....

Ecology
Corydoras are generally found in smaller-sized streams, along the margins of larger rivers, in marshes and ponds.[2] They are native to slow-moving and almost still (but seldom stagnant) streams and small rivers of South America where the water is shallow and very clear.[citation needed] Most species are bottom-dwellers, foraging in sand, gravel, or detritus.[2] The banks and sides of the streams are covered with a dense growth of plants, and this is where the corys are found. They inhabit a wide variety of water types but tend toward soft, neutral to slightly acidic or slightly alkaline pH and 5-10 degrees of hardness. They can tolerate only a small amount of salt (some species tolerate none at all) and do not inhabit environments with tidal influences.

Brackish water is estuarine and geographicaly near seawater,thats where its salt content comes from. Most fresh water is not somewhat brackish.
Does fresh water contain SOME salt, yes, but far from enough to label it brackish.

There are a few salt-sensitive "freshwater" fish, but most others are best off in brackish water. I keep my cichlid tank at 1.005, fully brackish.

Wow, show me where this is recommended by any freshwater expert in history please.

In nature, brackish water is found where freshwater rivers meet the sea. As you go further away from the sea, the salinity level reduces so there are certain degrees of brackish water along with species that can survive in it.​

The salinity level of a brackish tank should have a Specific Gravity (SG) of no more than 1.021. Full fledged saltwater tanks have a higher SG ranging from 1.021 to 1.026. ​

In a light brackish water tank (SG of 1.002 to 1.005) you can keep:​

• kribensis, glassfish
• live-bearers such as swordtails, platies and mollies (which can be conditioned to live in strong salt water)
• African cichlids because it seems to keep the diseases down and stimulate both growth and breeding

In a medium brackish water tank (SG of 1.006 up to full strength seawater at SG 1.021), you can raise:

• monos
• scats
• archerfish
• Colombian shark catfish
• violet gobies
• sunfish
• flags

So you show you have a good understanding of generally how to keep cichlids. There are thousands of other freshwater species that are not found in the same type of water conditions as some of your cichlids, so why would you believe most of them can be kept that way?​

Most of us try to keep our freshwater fish in an environment recommended and documented by experts who have been to the locations where that particular species of fish is found. A lot of research goes into identifying their exact environment. Papers are published, books are authored, most of this information provided so that hobbyists know how to keep that particular species of fish. Why on earth would you advocate that by your way of keeping most fish in brackish water is better for the fish? ​

So far you haven't provided any useful information for proper fishkeeping so I still don't understand the point of your setting up this thread. Do some of us do things because of old practices where there is no documented proof to change methods and do otherwise? Yup! We trust the people that have spent their lives trying to figure this all out for us. And we do some trial and error fishkeeping as well. Are some of the old fishkeeping practices not totally "spot on"? Yup. Will we ever have it all figured out perfectly? Nope. Does that make us wrong and ignorant? Nope. As time goes by and fishkeeping methods and myths are tried and tested with failures and successes we tweak what we can learn from those experiences. Myths do get debunked and some of it gets documented. One of the real problems with all the information available on the internet today is that when a myth does get debunked or a practice should change, no one goes back and changes the historical data that already exists, so there is some flawed material out there. But I don't think regular water changes/replenishment for aquariums is part of that flawed material. Tank maintenance can really only be based on each individual tank based on it's stocking level, species, size of fish, tank conditions, filtration used, daily feeding routines, etc. etc. Start with the basic tank maintenance recommendations and tweak it from there for you and your tank. For example, a pinch of food given by me might be a 100 times less than your pinch of food. So at the end of several days I'm going to have a lot less excess food polluting the water than you probably will have. Or say I have 20 guppies in a 10G tank and you have 20 guppies,2 angelfish and 3 plecos in your 20G tank. I think my water quality is going to be a bit better than yours long term and you'll need to do a water change before I will. Testing will show that in nitrate levels. But experience will tell you that without testing it. ​

​

 

[platytudes]

UGF as a reason not to need to change water as often?

You seem to be under the impression that under-gravel filters are BETTER for tanks, and that we've all stopped using them (OK, I never used them, I knew better) because we got lazy and are settling for lesser things.

In fact, the consensus seems to be that UGF are inferior, overall, to many of the other methods we now use. If anything, people who use those probably should change their water MORE often.

Not at all. Merely using it to describe a vague time period in fish keeping - not sure exactly when - the 70s and 80s maybe? I agree, UGFs are inferior, the only thing good they have going is that they are a cost effective means of filtration. But arguably, sponge filters are much more useful - except that many fish don't like the reflection that a bare bottom tank produces. (Painting the bottom could easily solve this)