strange acclimating method recommended, are they wrong?

gagaliya

gagaliya

GNOME POWER!
Nov 20, 2005
943
0
16
NJ
www.happyreward.com
I ordered part of my fishes from **************** and it will arrive next day air tomorrow. Was reading through some of the info on their website, those guys seem to have a lot of experience but here is what they said about acclimating fish...

Acclimate the fish using the following procedure even if the fish appear to be dead.

Cut the top off of bag with a pair of scissors.

Pour most of the water from the bag into a clean bucket, but leave the fish in the bag.

Then pour the fish and the remaining small amount of water into your fish's new home.

Do not float the bag.

Do not slowly add your water to the bag.

Do not aerate the water in the bag.



It should not shock the new fish if the temperature or chemistry of the water in the bag is different from the water in their new home, provided you have cleaned your aquarium, washed the gravel, and added fresh water on the previous day as described in the previous paragraphs.
Click to expand...

source: http://www.****************/pages/warranty.htm

Elsewhere we have read the following criticism of these recommendations, "You should never put any water from the shipping bag into your aquarium because that water contains pathogens and lots of ammonia." Yes, the shipping water will contain pathogens and ammonia. But there will be more of both in and on the bodies of the fish than there will be in the small amount of shipping water poured into the aquarium.
....
Click to expand...

Quarantine? Should You Quarantine New Fish? Very rarely new fish carry diseases that cause problems to the fish already living in an aquarium. We believe that most such cases are a coincidence.

But if you are concerned that the new fish may carry a disease and that disease may be dangerous to the fish you already have, then you should have a separate aquarium to quarantine the new fish. This is your choice.

We think a quarantine is unnecessary, when you get fish from us. But we do not assume responsibility for the other fish that you already own or for any other consequential damages you may incur.
Click to expand...

source: http://www.****************/pages/warranty_p2.htm#top2

so what you guys think...should i just dump my fish in the tank as soon as i get it. Or follow the float bag, pour water in over time method? :help:
 
Six of that and a half dozen of another.

The internet is a very public and vocal venue and online vendors run the risk of getting totally trashed if they do not sell quality product.

Local stores rarely get trashed like that.

If you go to your LFS and buy fish with ich, who are you gonna tell? Maybe your local fish/aquatic plant club if you belong to one. But there really is no way to "spread the word" and so they will still sell their fish with ich.

If you buy a fish with ich on line, who are you gonna tell? Pretty much ALL the possible customers of that store. If you post about it in a few places, then everyone who bothers to do a search on the business will know that you got fish with ich from that vendor and that can spell doom.

In summary, online vendors have a lot more to lose than local ones and they *have* to make sure the fish they ship are clean and disease free. This is why I actually prefer to buy my fish on line rather than from the LFS.

As for their acclimation instructions. Sure! I'd do all that and the water too, but ONLY into a QT tank. *Never* in my main tank.

Don't care where the fish comes from, I ain't putting their water in my main tank, OR their bags.

As an aside, I've bought fish from **************** before and I just use my own acclimation procedures and they always go into a QT tank. Never had a problem with their fish. Their instructions for cleaning the tank et al probably is their way of reducing the possibilities of osmotic shock. Cleaned gravel, fresh water. I don't think what they are saying is smart, but that's MO.

Couple of other things:

1) if you are not going to follow their instructions and dump the fish into a tank, then when you open the bag add one drop of water conditioner that deals with ammonia. Ammonia can build up to well over 2.0 ppm in a shipping bag and you need to detoxify that as soon as you can. This may be part of the reason why they want you to just dump the fish in the water.

2) don't float bags in your tank. It's not a good idea. You don't know where the bag has been, who handled it? Did they have soap on their hands? Grease? Chemicals? No foreign bags in tank. Use a container.

Roan
 
Last edited:
IMHO, that last quote is absurd. I do not know the company involved (I do not order much online), and perhaps they QT and treat all of their fish in-house before they sell or ship them. But from a long time on the web forums, the commonest source for infectious disease in tanks is from newly introduced fish. It is standard and routine. It is not under any circumstances rare.

I have not in decades had an outbreak of infectious disease in any of my display tanks, but I have also not in the same interval introduced any new fish into an existing display tank without QT. And my QT is a minimum of 4 weks and may be much longer.

You choice of adjusting the newcomers to your water and your care is personal choice, but I am conservative. Newcomers are held in a catch bucket or tank bucket and have tank water added periodically to boost the volume at least four-fold or more, then are netted and moved to the QT tank while the water is discarded. Very sensitive fish are drip-acclimated over a longer period before that move. Osmotic shock is real, disease introduction is real, and tank wipe-outs are no fun at all.

IME, the commonest issues with hobby tanks are based on lack of knowledge or information on the cycling process and needs of tanks, followed closely by lack of info on water change needs. But the next tier of problems is introduced disease and incompabilitiies between fish. The next level would be learning how little to feed and what foods to use for particular fish.

All JMHO & IME, YMMV.
 
I'd never plunk fish into a tank like that personally (can't really call it "acclimating"), but some people do it that way and report good results. There are a lot of different factors involved (species of fish, variations in water chemistry, etc.), but I prefer to make the transition as smooth as possible.
 
here's what i did, mostly because the fish were not in good shape - they were single bagged(good) but with very little water and only 1 heat pack(bad) in a 20 fish box. Water was cold and in terrible condition, fish were dying.


1) add bio coat for 50 gallon quantity, half in hob half in water (water was already treated with biosafe a week earlier, so this is more for stress reduction)
2) wait 10 mins
3) add in 3oz of biospira (enough for 75gallon), half in hob, half in water
4) pour bag with fish into net, then rinse fish gently with tank water, then place fish into tank. Did this 1 by 1.
5) fed a tiny bit of food, which were all eaten eagerly.

i bought 14 male fancy guppies, 6 albino cory cat aenus(with 1 doa, so 5).
 
Last edited:
We think a quarantine is unnecessary, when you get fish from us. But we do not assume responsibility for the other fish that you already own or for any other consequential damages you may incur.
Click to expand...
While I'm open-minded toward their method of acclimation, this quote demonstrates a high degree of carelessness.
 
Yeah, they think quarantine is unnecessary, but they then they say that they are not responsible if their fish has a disease and causes all of your fish to die. :confused:

I believe that I read on their site that their warranty only applies if you have a bio-wheel filter. I don't like the idea of someone saying that their warranty is only good if you have a specific product when other filters work just fine. I guess I won't go on and bash their site but there are other things on there that I don't agree with either. (This is unrelated to fish keeping, but I just went their site and my firewall blocked some spyware. Went to the site 2 more times to make sure and each time it blocked the same spyware. Actually its adware, not dangerous, but annoying.)

Another bad thing about the float bag method, most poeple have their lights on when they float the bag. The water in the bag usually ends up hotter than the water in the tank.

I pour the bag of water with the fish in a bucket and add a half cup of water to my tank every ten minutes untill I have about a half gallon. Then put them in the thank, and throw the water away.
 
when i got my otos i put them in a clean bag and floated it in the tank. every 1/2 hour i added a quarter cup of tank water to the bag. i had the lights OFF while i floated it as well. i let it float for 2 hours, then netted the otos and put them in the tank. so far they are all fine and no signs of disease.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
AquariaCentral.com
Top Bottom