Acclimating your fish or inverts , do's and don'ts

Anything Aquarium-Related that does not fit neatly into one of the other categories.
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Gerwin
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Acclimating your fish or inverts , do's and don'ts

Post by Gerwin » Sun Aug 26, 2007 6:16 pm

Many people make some very common errors in the process of acclimating their newly purchased livestock and I will discuss the basic goals of this task and what has worked for me for over 30 years in the retail business for both salt and fresh water.

As discussed in a previous thread, you need to go straight home with your new fish!!! And reading Doug’s post on this is a excellent idea at this time if you have not already.
With that out of the way, here it is made easy and to the point.

If you purchased the fish out of one of the tanks in the pet store, float the bag in your aquarium (basically its going to look like a bobber), after about 5 minutes I open the top and add about 1/4 inch of water to the existing bag water, and repeat process every 3-5 minutes about 4-20 times or 20-60 total minutes.(see bottom for ex of specimens to acclimate for about a hour) When completed remove fish / coral / invert from bag and place in tank and throw water accumulated in bag away. Top off aquarium as needed and you are done.
****** IF THE LIVESTOCK was purchased as the shipment arrived to the pet store, another words it had not been acclimated to pet store display tank first, then only float the livestock for 20 minutes and never drip or add tank water to the bag. Why? In short, the ph has dropped in the shipping bag dramatically over a 12-24 hour period and you could release toxic ammonia with the addition of higher ph water, bottom line DO NOT BREAK THIS RULE. Of course one must truly trust their judgment when buying livestock without first observing it in a display tank.

When possible I prefer to drain water from bag leaving specimen in bag and then pouring the specimen into the aquarium, and thus not having to net the specimen. Of course corals would be a different story….dumping then into tank may not be the brightest idea.

Most fish tolerate a lot of abuse and many ways may have worked for you, but for over 3 decades this has been our way and for a retail fish store to stay around for 32 years, you can’t be messing up to bad.

most fish /corals are good with 20-45 minute acclimation, some that need to go the distance would be:

All marine crustaceans
All Starfish especially those of the Linkia family (BLue!)
All Tangs
Freshwater:
Pictus Catfish
Shovelnose Cats
Silver Dollars
Parrot Cichlids
Clown Loaches
Black Ghost
All the above F/W go at least 45-60 minutes

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