bethd217
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Something I've been wondering about...
Last year, I was taking care of a bunch of juveniles that were left over from a lab class. They were kept in glass bowls, and I would give them a total water change every other day from a large plastic tub of aged water. As far as I could tell, they seemed OK -- every so often, I would find one dead, but I suspect that had more to do with cannibalism than water conditions. I ended up adopting two of them, and kept them in plastic containers for a while before getting an aquarium. Again, I did a total water change every other day and it didn't seem to bother them.
However, they laid eggs in the spring, and the same procedure didn't work as well for me this time. When the larvae were still very small, I was keeping them in groups in plastic containers and doing partial water changes every day, with spot cleaning to get rid of visible waste. One day, though, I decided that the containers were still getting dirtier and dirtier, and so I did a total water change. Imagine my horror when I looked at them the next day and an entire container of larvae was dead! Well, almost -- I found a few that were still twitching and transferred them into water taken from the adults' tank, and they revived. The rest of the larvae were fine. Then, when they got big enough that I started to worry about cannibalism and I wanted to separate them, I tried putting one at a time into a fresh container, and I found that putting them into clean water resulted in dead larvae the next day, but using water from the main aquarium kept them healthy.
So ever since then I've only taken water for the babies (juveniles now) out of the aquarium, not directly from the buckets where I age the water, and I haven't had any more problems. But I am curious about what might have caused this, since my adults are fine and the juveniles I was caring for last year also seemed OK with totally new water. Could it have something to do with the food? My new larvae were eating brine shrimp when this happened (versus pellets on the earlier occasions), and I understand that those can foul water very quickly, so I thought maybe the clean water didn't have a bacterial population that could detoxify brine shrimp debris. I weaned the current batch of babies onto pellets a while ago, and every so often I think about testing this theory by putting one in clean water, but I'm too afraid I might be wrong and it would die. Does anyone else understand this better than I do?
Last year, I was taking care of a bunch of juveniles that were left over from a lab class. They were kept in glass bowls, and I would give them a total water change every other day from a large plastic tub of aged water. As far as I could tell, they seemed OK -- every so often, I would find one dead, but I suspect that had more to do with cannibalism than water conditions. I ended up adopting two of them, and kept them in plastic containers for a while before getting an aquarium. Again, I did a total water change every other day and it didn't seem to bother them.
However, they laid eggs in the spring, and the same procedure didn't work as well for me this time. When the larvae were still very small, I was keeping them in groups in plastic containers and doing partial water changes every day, with spot cleaning to get rid of visible waste. One day, though, I decided that the containers were still getting dirtier and dirtier, and so I did a total water change. Imagine my horror when I looked at them the next day and an entire container of larvae was dead! Well, almost -- I found a few that were still twitching and transferred them into water taken from the adults' tank, and they revived. The rest of the larvae were fine. Then, when they got big enough that I started to worry about cannibalism and I wanted to separate them, I tried putting one at a time into a fresh container, and I found that putting them into clean water resulted in dead larvae the next day, but using water from the main aquarium kept them healthy.
So ever since then I've only taken water for the babies (juveniles now) out of the aquarium, not directly from the buckets where I age the water, and I haven't had any more problems. But I am curious about what might have caused this, since my adults are fine and the juveniles I was caring for last year also seemed OK with totally new water. Could it have something to do with the food? My new larvae were eating brine shrimp when this happened (versus pellets on the earlier occasions), and I understand that those can foul water very quickly, so I thought maybe the clean water didn't have a bacterial population that could detoxify brine shrimp debris. I weaned the current batch of babies onto pellets a while ago, and every so often I think about testing this theory by putting one in clean water, but I'm too afraid I might be wrong and it would die. Does anyone else understand this better than I do?
After reading what you had done with your babies, I now why my brood died.. I had changed the water, and it might have been the change in the condition of it..