Loaches Online Forum

The article on spawn clown loach by colin indicated the PH in his tank is 4.7. Emma also maintained her clown loach aquarium at a similarly low pH for a long time.

I keep my PH just below 7, since my tap water is well 'Buffer', it is very stable at this level. Also I changed water every other days (25%). Apart for RO, how we can maintained such low PH? Also this is the 1st time I find reference to maintained Clown loach in such a low PH value.

"In the practicalfishkeep article colin reduced the pH down to 4.5 with hydrochloric acid". Can you just add hydrochloric acid to the water to low the PH?

I guess everyone is try to find the trigger(s) to spwan clown loach, to try something I haven't try before seem is the right thing to do (Colin and Emma are doing it!)

Why not send Colin a PM. I'm sure he will be willing to explain.

http://forums.loaches.com/profile.php?m ... ile&u=2299

I dont know much about the inducing spawning and HCl, but many folks lower the pH by using peat moss. Depending on the size of your tank and how well its buffered factors in to how much peat it takes for a given effect. It will leach tannins though, darkening your water slightly (like tea). You can place some in a media bag or nylon and put it in your filter or even in your tank in an area of good circulation. Will have to be changed regularly though.

Hi

I am lucky here in that there is virtually no hardness at all to the water so if i were to just fill a tank with water and run an airstone the pH will drop over a couple of weeks to 5 and then on to 4 after another week or two. Adding fish greatly speeds this up.

Never add acid straight to the tank, mix it with water before a water change first and always change the pH gradually over a few days if not a week or two.

I maintain a lot of my tanks at pH 4 and some are even less. My Betta ibanorum has been holding eggs/fry in his mouth now for 6 days and I find that if the pH is not less than 4.5 he will eat them. (incidenlty, the ibanorum spawning earlier in the year was the first outside their home range and no-one cared about that LOL ) anyway, their tank is about 3.5 just now.

Clown loaches come from some areas which have VERY low pH, Very low hardness and low TDS...

What is your GH?

If you add acid it probably wouldn't have much effect. Why not try rainwater which is free, or these days, even an RO unit isn't all that expensive

hope that helps
Colin

Hi Tony & welcome to Loaches Online.

As this is your first post on the forum, I have no idea what your level of fishkeeping experience is, and without wanting to offend you (or others), I wouldn't recommend trying to lower the pH of your clown loach aquarium to this sort of level unless you have a lot of fishkeeping experience.

The pH in our tank was always maintained around 6.0 with a general hardness level of 5-6dH. We use solely RO water with a low level of remineralisation (Tropic Marin Remineral Freshwater powder) and very large amount of big bogwood pieces. The tank is extremely well filtered, but the stocking level is high, so the organic load is pretty high. Frequent partial water changes keep the nitrate level below 40ppm (in fact it is usually much lower). Because of all these factors, we found that the pH, over a period of about 6-12 months, gradually dropped. As we were not observing any negative effects on the fish or their behaviour, we decided not to interfere at that point, and subsequently, it dropped below 4. The lowest it got to at one stage was 3.7. However, once it was this low, we found that our Green Mascara Barbs (Puntius filamentosus) stopped spawning, and as there has been virtually nothing documented on keeping clown loaches in these conditions long-term, we were not 100% sure we should be keeping it there. The fish did all look very vibrant and healthy though.

It must be taken into consideration that as the pH is dropped low, the bacteria in the filtration may initially die off and so you have to be very vigilant for ammonia spikes. Although we found that when the pH got to around 5.5 we saw a moderate level of ammonia, the fact that we were doing daily water changes coupled with the fact that at this level of pH you would need a massive amount of ammonia present for it to be toxic to the fish (ammonia toxicity decreases as the pH decreases), meant that this wasn't a problem.

However, this could pose a threat to the fish if your pH was swinging about a lot more, or if you chose to suddenly increase the pH back to it's usual neutral(ish) position. For example, if you were using your main tank in a breeding attempt, and the pH was lowered to say 4-5, this change would kill most (if not all) the bacteria in the filter, then if the pH was unstable or if it was brought back up towards neutral too quickly so that the bacteria did not have time to re-establish, you could have major losses.

This is why it needs careful thinking about and constant vigilance. When we decided to increase our pH back up to 6.0-6.5, we added a very small amount of Aragonite (calcium carbonate gravel) to one of our external filters. We started off with about 10% of what we ended up needing in total to raise the pH very gradually (over some months) and kept it stable. It took a good 8 weeks or so to do this, initially also adding a small amount of zeolite, and there was never any ammonia spike.

If you wish to lower the pH without using RO water, I would firstly suggest using peat. If the tank is so big (I have no idea what size your tank is) that using peat isn't viable - and if you are confident in what you are doing - it is possible to use hydrochloric acid. However, I am not going to advise you to do this on here as I would not want to be held responsible for you or anyone else reading this if you were to lose fish or injure yourself (HCl being highly corrosive and dangerous to use). Never use HCl directly in the tank.

Due to Colin's recent success, and subsequent conversations between him & I, I am now confident that the low pH & hardness level is the way to go. I am currently in the process of removing some of the Aragonite from the filters in order to begin dropping the pH again. However, if a real attempt at spawning is to be made, I will have to try and acquire a separate decent sized aquarium to try this in, as I believe that the presence of too many individuals may have hampered my previous efforts.

Hope this helps, and although it is obvious - be very careful with altering water parameters so drastically, particularly where precious XL clowns are concerned.

Emma

Hi Tony

Before talking about altering pH, I would highly recommend you keep records of what the GH, KH, pH and TDS is of your tap water (or whatever source) and what the tank water does on a daily basis, even AM and PH notes, especially if you have plants.

Once you see what a couple of months is like, you can try adding peat moss to the filter and see what changes that makes to the tank water. Peat acts slowly, so it is usually OK to add it directly to the filter.
Any other changes you are thinking of, test them in a bucket of water with careful measurements, and monitor that bucket, testing daily, so you can see if that mix is stable or not.

Remember that whatever changes you do to the tank will have to be done to the new water you are preparing for water changes, so keep records of exactly how much of whatever you used per gallon, or per bucket.

If you have current test results for KH, GH, pH and TDS, of both tap and tank, please post them.

One good thing about adding the peat is that it not only can decrease pH in the tank but it also adds a lot of organic chemicals... perhaps the addition of peat humus etc acts as chemical cues to the fish?

That's why a lot of people subscribe to using Indian Almond leaves too.

I think that a tank of peat would be exceptionally cool for clown loaches. Probably a much more natural substrate than gravel.

Many Thanks for all the responses! It’s a very warm welcome .

Been worked on fish farms in Hong Kong (where I original came from) for number of years, luck enough to witness a few fish spawn, discus, mono sebae, arowana. Clown loach is one of my favourite and also is very popular, but never see/know anyone able to breed these fish (not even with aid of hormone injection or other artificial means).

Clown loach can reproduce in the natural for such large volume. Millions exports every year to the world, “it should be too difficult to spawn these fish”, and that was over twenty years ago I said.

I have 3 four foot tanks setup (about 400 litre each) for the clown, one have very heavily planted, one with a lot of bogwood and a few plants, last one just a bare tank with two power heads (similar design to http://www.bollmoraakvarieklubb.org/art ... 0loach.htm and Martin’s tank). They all very well filtered. And I change water every other day (25% around 100 litre), nitrate level is very low although I tend to feed very heavily (this may not be the right things to do)! I do not have a RO but I do use ‘age’ water for water change. PH is almost a constant at 7 and my clown loaches are growing as I expected.

The article by Colin and also confirmed by Emma, clown loach can be maintain in a tank which the PH is as low as 4, I never keep any fresh water fish as low as that level, and how long they can be keep in that level? To change PH in my tanks is a very risk thing to do, as rule of thumb “steady PH is much better than correct PH”. But after all these years, try a few things but without any luck, I willing to take the risk and try to low the PH, as Emma said, the low PH and hardness level is the way to go, I do believe that is the case.

But to low PH from 7 to 4, 3 levels in PH scale is equal to 1000 time! And I never keep fish in that level; don’t even know where to start.
1) Due to the size of my tank and water change - not sure peat is a viable solution, may try the Indian Almond leaves as Colin suggest , but would the PH go down to 4? .
2) May setup a small tank and try the HCI (without any fish) Coline may I ask you where you get your HCI from. But due to I have high KH in my tap water, although I may able to low the PH but it will swing back and that is even worst.
3) Rain water is a good ideal, but do you have to prepare the water before add to the tank? And also I don’t think I have enough rain water for all my tanks.
4) RO water – I guess that is the solution in front of me and I try to find something else! I believe in water change, some other fish we change almost 80% of water every day, for the clown loach I gradually increase the amount of water I changed, I do notice the rate of grow for young clown loaches faster than if I only do a weekly water change. So any advice on which make of RO is good for aquarium please, I need to figure out what Gallon per day I need.

I am very grateful people who share their experience and the help, best of luck and hope I can hear the good news in this web site very soon!

Tony

PS

I have a tank with conditions that might be possible for you:

Tap water:
TDS mid 300s
KH 5 degrees
GH 5 degrees
pH mid 7's to 8 (varies with the season)

Tank is 29 (American) gallons, (120+ liters) with a substrate that removes KH. The ADA (Amano) substrates will do this, too, but would be VERY expensive for large tanks as you describe. I have about 1/8 of a liter of peat moss in the filter, which I change monthly.

TDS mid 300s
KH 0 degrees (Even when I add baking soda it drops back down in a couple of days)
GH 5 degrees (I add plant fertilizer)
pH 6.2

I think the easiest way for you to get water like you want will be similar to what worked when my RO filter was running:
KH and GH were very low, about 1 degree or less (Filter was old, and some stuff was getting through). pH was neutral (Membrane was not so tight it was stripping electrons off) I did not have a TDS meter in those days.
I would add peat moss to this water and drop the pH into the low 6's, but I would also add some minerals so the KH and GH came up a bit, and the pH could be kept at 6.5, very stable.

Of course water change water has to be prepared ahead of time, but I have gotten very good at it, and whenever I test to see that I have made it properly, I have.

As long as you make the change VERY slowly (like over a month of small changes) you could likely get the water closer to what you are looking for.

Ammonia is significantly less toxic when pH is <7 but it isn't non-toxic. If a test turns up a total ammonia > 0, there should be concern even at acidic pH.

Tony, these clowns I have, and all the other fish in that tank, have been at this pH since June 2005, and before that I am not so sure as I didnt have a digital pH meter but I guess around the same.

Good luck