[AquaticLife] pH change
I know you take good care of your tanks but whenever I answer a post, I know there are hundreds or thousands of others reading the post so I try to cover many bases with my answers so others might learn something.
Yes, fish seem to tolerate pH changes better… especially if the pH change is CO2 related. There are countless planted tanks with fish out there that have CO2 injection for the plants and the change in pH, when altered by the CO2, does not seem to affect the fish. Your case does not seem to be caused by this effect.
I haven’t done any major reading about this but I would suspect that fish in planted tank get acclimated to the changing pH between night and day and that the GH and KH and other trace element levels in the planted tanks are high enough so that it’s not as much of an osmotic shock to the fish as it might be in a tank with low KH, GH and low trace elements and then there is a pH drop because of these low levels.
Also, a drastically lowering pH seems to cause more shock issues than a rising pH so it might have been more troubling to the fish to have it drop ..5 rather than rise .5 and then come back to it’s “normal” level of 7.4
If you can see a little algae, then you probably have a lot more growing in all the nooks and crannies that you don’t really see. After all, algae are single celled “plants” so it could be the algae that is using up the CO2 during the day when the lights were on all day that caused the pH to go up and at night, the pH goes back down as the CO2 levels increase in the water..
Let us know how the pH morning/evening test comparison goes.
Lenny Vasbinder Fish Blog - http://GoldLenny.blogspot.com
Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society
