What are your parameters-part 1
What are your parameters is a question I ask far too often. Most issues in fish keeping can be traced back to issues with our water, so when trying to help I will ask that question.
But what do I mean, what are I refering to when I ask that question? What is ammonia and why is it an issue, why do we want to know. Where does ammonia and nitrite come from, and what harm do they cause?
This is for those just starting out, and for more experienced aquarists, hopefully there will be something interesting for everyone.
Ruth McDonald has been keeping fish for over two decades now, and has been researching fish since her master thesis into what fish eat dead bodies took a turn into what fish like to eat. She’s taught at university level, and has been running Tropical Fish Keeping UK for 10 years.
Transcript
Untitled – October 21, 2025
00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome back to the Tropical Fishkeeping UK podcast. I was so pleased that so many of you came back to listening to me read on about fish stuff. It was lovely to see that you came back after my unplanned break. So this was planned to be the first episode back, and then I decided to have a bit of a rant that I did last week. If you haven’t heard that one yet, please go and enjoy the me slightly losing my temper at a silly article that had been written. But the question I wanted to ask is what are your parameters and what does that mean? You’ve maybe come on the group and you’ve said, help, I’ve got this problem. My fish is injured, my fish is acting weird, and I’ve gone. What are your parameters? And my phone used to correct to that. I put a w in and it went what. And then the next word was R and so on until I got through that one. But I’m aware that for many people, it’s this horribly complicated chemistry sort of thing. Or you might be an experienced aquarist and you’re you go. Now I know what all those are, but actually, do I know the mechanisms behind it? Do I know in depth? So I’m hoping if you’re experienced or if you’re a beginner or you’re anywhere in between, you’re going to get something out of this because we’re going to take a dive into that question. And so they’ll say, well, what do I mean, what are your parameters? So if you’re a beginner here, what do I mean by that? I mean the water test kit the water tests. So you might have a test strips liquid test kit. You might have an app. There’s titration. There’s meters. There’s all sorts of different ways of measuring what’s going on in your water. And I’m going to start this by saying you’re going to see people go strips are wrong. Liquid test kits. The only way liquid test kits are too expensive. Meters are also the only way you’re going to see a whole range of opinions. And I’m mostly talking about fresh water. Step over to the salty side. They spend money. They spend big money on this sort of thing. So they’re looking at ICP tests and a variety of huge things. They’re not wrong, by the way. Generally, I’m going to say that for most of us, liquid test kits are the way to go. I’ve used strips some hands up, I’ve used them before, and one thing I do frequently use them for is if I need to do a test in a remote area, I might be walking in, walking out. I don’t want to be carrying a lot of stuff. So a test strip is nice and easy. Dip it in, look at it and go oop! Yep, the main where they fall down on accuracy is the second they’re exposed to air. So you open the container to get one out. Close the container. You’ve exposed the rest of that strip to the moisture in the air. And they might have reacted to that. I had one case when I was working on a river dip, the test strip. I opened the packet, pulled one out, closed the packet, the container, and it was a sealed container. When I got home, I opened it and they were all registering. They’d all just slightly changed color, just slightly, and they were all registering the thing for the river. I tested them in a known sample and they were inaccurate. At that point, they were still reading slightly for the the moisture in the air around the river. So that’s where the problems come in. Liquid test kits, they’re more accurate if you use them right from day one. You won’t get any of these problems. I wouldn’t put like wouldn’t bet your life on it. I wouldn’t also bet your fish’s life on their complete accuracy, but they are a good middle ground. Apps, you’ll see, tend to use test strips, including that fancy machine that’s been seen at more aquatic shops. Now. Sadly, it’s great and it gives you a lovely readout and everything, but it’s actually using test strips itself. You’ve got meters tend to be more expensive. If you buy a cheap pH meter, you’re going to get cheap pH meter readings. In the lab, we used to spend a few hundred on our cheaper end pH meters, thousands. They can, they can be. And the more you spend, sadly, the more accurate they get. A decent pH meter should also have two probes, one for temperature and one for reading the pH, because pH changes with temperature. You could, in theory, take yourself back to science class by all the glassware, by all the chemicals. It’s going to be a lot more faff. It’s also going to be a lot more expensive in the short term. It’s actually cheaper in the long term, but it’s a lot more a lot more work to do that sort of thing. You also have the option for I mentioned ICP. That’s where you send off a sample to a lab and they do all the testing and send it back. Is it worth it? I’d say yes, especially if you’re working with marine. But is it quick? No, because it takes turnaround time on the labs. So they’ve all got advantages and disadvantages. For the bulk of you listening liquid test kits, head over to the website. I will put up a review on various test kits that I’ve used over the years, and hopefully it’ll give you an idea of the pros and cons of all the different ones. And trust me, I think I’ve used most of them, uh, in the last few years even. But what am I talking about in general with this sort of water test kit you’ve got now? You’ve bought your liquid test kit. You’re sitting there looking at it and feeling like a mad scientist in a fish tank. We have something called the nitrogen cycle, the nitrogen. I prefer the nitrogen process because there is a very little chance of you completing that process in a fish tank in a healthy way for your fish ammonia, nitrite, nitrate. And if you’re a beginner and you take nothing away from this ammonia, just just take these things. Ammonia toxic. Keep that at zero on your test kit. Nitrite toxic. Keep that at zero on your test kit. Nitrite safer. Ideally keep it below twenty. And we’re going to go into more depth than this in the very in the in the next bits either in this episode or in an episode coming up. That’s the three main ones ammonia, nitrite, nitrate. Then you look at pH. Different fish need different parameters. Some need different pH, different hardness, all this sort of thing. So pH is handy to know for just knowing what your fish need. Not all test kits have them, but I think if your test kit doesn’t go and buy them separately, most you can buy these definitely separately. Hardness. You might hear that referred to as g and k or total alkalinity and carbonates. There’s a few other ways, but generally your hardness. Different fish need different hardnesses. We’ll talk about this when we talk about hardness. But fish can’t evolve in the short period of time we’ve been keeping them. Even goldfish. Goldfish, which have been probably kept the longest of any of the pet fish we have, haven’t evolved to not still prefer the slightly harder waters. They can live in other things, but they still thrive in their ideal pH and K and they are linked. K influences pH. You might also see in your test kits things like chlorine, dissolved oxygen, phosphates, carbon dioxide and now more recently hydrogen sulfide. Not sure why that one. You might also see other ones. There’s a lot of rebadging, so they’ll take a hot tub, test strips and rebadge them for the aquarium. So if you’re not seeing ammonia, nitrite, nitrates, but you are seeing other things, you’ve probably been mis sold hot tub test strips. Try saying that three times quickly. But yeah, that’s the next few episodes worth of stuff that we’re going to be talking about. And as I said, if you’re a raw beginner, I hope you’re going to learn a lot. And if you’re an experienced aquarist or like I say, anywhere in between, really hoping that I’m gonna interest you. Educate maybe, but definitely interest. So where am I going to start? Ammonia. Ammonia itself comes in two forms. So NH3. So one nitrogen atom surrounded by three hydrogen atoms. That’s gaseous. Even in water. It’s just a dissolved gas in water and NH four For ammonium, which isn’t a dissolved gas in water. Let’s keep it as simple as that, because fish produce ammonia and put that out into the tank. You get a tank that’s got a filter that doesn’t have any of the bacteria needed to convert that ammonia to nitrite and then onto nitrates. The ammonia will build up ammonia, and ammonium will build up in the water, and that will lead to the fish dying. This is called generally new tank syndrome NTS. If you want to know the safe level I’m going to say naught point naught two. You can say naught point naught two milligrams per liter or parts per million because it’s a gas dissolved in water, it’s the same thing. So it’s a molecule. The fish produce it. It’s produced internally in all vertebrates. If you talk about a human liver failure, for example, one of the main neurotoxins that we discussed that leads to all the problems with people in liver failure and sadly can lead to death. Is ammonia in fish. I’m actually going to pause before I carry on on that one. There’s no such thing as a fish. It’s a throwaway line that I and a lot of other people use. There’s so many different species of fish, and they’re so diverse across the planet that what’s true of one fish is not true of another fish. So I am speaking in large generalities, and some of the examples I’m going to use are rather specific to that. Add to that we haven’t studied every species of fish. So later on I’m going to talk about air breathing fish. That’s everything from your betta through to snakeheads. They’re not too far apart in terms of relationships, but lungfish from Africa, they’re not nowhere even close to being related to the other two. So what’s good for one? Not necessarily for the other. So just keep that in mind. Different fish, different reactions to different things. So ammonia production when you feed your fish you feed them protein. There’ll be protein in their diet and the nitrogen that forms the center bit of the molecules it comes from dietary protein. You may have remembered from school amino acids. Well, it’s the amino acids that form the part of the protein that the body can break down, and it can use it to build other proteins, or it can, in most vertebrates, break that down into carbohydrates to be used as an energy source. Here’s a crucial fact. You can store glucose and you can store fats. So you can store carbohydrates. You can store fats, you can’t store proteins, you can build muscles, and then you can break them down. But there’s no inbuilt source for storing these two. So a lot of things fish included will use the proteins as dietary as as energy before they use the other things purely because they can’t store them. So they tend to in rainbow trout definitely. They start to break down the amino acids in the intestines. And it’s this breakdown of amino acids that produces the nitrates. The produces the nitrogen or provides the nitrogen that is then built up into ammonia. So we know that, for example, goldfish, fifty to seventy percent of the ammonia is produced in mitochondria in the liver. Hey, you thought you’d got away from mitochondria when you left GCSE biology. It’s back. Ammonia is mostly excreted through the gills. I’ve been talking in the ninety percent for most of them. We know that you feed a fish for a lot of catfish, especially just because the studies have been done on that. Forty to sixty percent of that is excreted over the following twenty four hours post feeding. So it doesn’t all come out as one great big lump. I think the one thing they didn’t take into account in these studies is solid feces. So if you feed a fish, it doesn’t digest all that food. It poops it out for various reasons, including being stressed or being ill. Some of the dietary protein will remain within that feces, and therefore you’ve got an ammonia build up. Which is why I am always saying, please clean your filters out more often. So many people leave them for months between because all that waste is building up and there’s a thousand reasons why you should. But while we’re talking about ammonia, because it can produce ammonia, and if it doesn’t produce ammonia because it’s in the filter and the bacteria are dealing with it straight away, you’re giving yourself a nitrate factory. But anyway, ammonia can cross the blood brain barrier. It can also cross into cells. It can cause all sorts of problems. And in poor conditions, what fish will do is they will stop breaking down amino acids. So stop producing this energy. And that will reduce the amount of ammonia they’re producing. Because ammonia is only a problem when it’s inside the fish for the most, you get small amounts of ammonia burns if you’ve got a lot of ammonia. But generally death is caused because the ammonia is built up inside the fish, so they’ll stop trying to produce it. This isn’t a wonderful solution to the problem. Many processes in our bodies, in fishes Fisher’s bodies when it can’t happen. In an ideal way, the body goes well. I’d rather hurt myself than kill myself. So it will produce something in some way that may lead to oxidative stress is one sentence we use, so it will lead to an earlier death for these animals, but it won’t kill them. Right now, this ammonia is building up inside the fish. It normally builds up after feeding. For some species it will build up after swimming. So what will be happening is the fish might be using their own muscle stores to break down, to provide energy for swimming and for exercise and activity. It seems to build up in some fish after extreme stress events. I can’t remember the study I got that one from, so please don’t quote me on that one. But I do remember that being said, when they do the studies, they tend to do the studies on starving, immobile fish. They put them in small tanks because it’s easier to monitor and they don’t feed them. So what that means is that the reality is a little bit different, because when fish are moving and when fish are feeding, they are producing more ammonia. But here’s the crucial fact. We know that fish can protect themselves internally from these problems. So you feed the fish, the ammonia levels in their blood go up and a protective mechanism kicks in. It’s not very well understood to stop them dying from their own toxicity. I’ve been saying ammonia in the blood. I technically should be saying ammonium. It’s about ninety five percent of the ammonia in the fish’s blood is actually in the form of ammonium, which is a lot more protective. Ammonium can’t cross the blood brain barrier in any the same way it can’t cross into a loss of cells in the same way. So it is a lot more a lot safer for them. It’s not safe, but it is safer. Now what then happens? The all the blood at some point crosses the gills goes it goes near the gills in the same way it goes near our lungs. And the ammonium, sorry, ammonia is diffused out across the gills. This assumes that there’s no ammonia or very little ammonia outside the fish. You might remember diffusion back from school. It goes from a high concentration to a low concentration. If externally it is also a high concentration. It can’t diffuse out. Also, if you have ammonia outside the fish it will be crossing back into the fish. So not only is the stuff internally not escaping the same ways, but the stuff externally is coming in. We’ll discuss why later. In low pH conditions you get more ammonium outside the fish, so that’s less of an issue of it crossing back into the fish. It’s still a bit of an issue for diffusion out, but it’s less of an issue. I will say that some fish we’re not sure if it’s all, but some fish can definitely force the ammonia and ammonium out. And so they they pump out ammonia and hydrogen ions to lower the pH to increase the pH of their blood. If they’ve got too many hydrogen ions inside, the blood will go too acidic. Acidosis is a bad thing. So they will pump out hydrogen ions and ammonia at the same time, and they’ll take in sodium ions. So again, if you put them in a position where they haven’t got the right stuff outside, they can’t get the right stuff inside. Excess ammonia in the fish will disrupt cellular processes. So the very fundamental parts of the fish and it will replace the potassium channels in their cells. So the cell signaling the I’m not just talking about thoughts, I’m talking about heartbeats. I’m talking about movement. I’m talking about how the brain operates, all this sort of thing. It will replace that with ammonium ammonia. sorry. Instead of potassium, which leads to death. And you see it when you do see fish dying of ammonia poisoning, convulsions, they’ll start to lose their balance, all these sorts of problems, and eventually it leads to death. There is a really interesting thing, though. Again, back to the whole not all fish, um, no such thing as a fish. We know that air breathing fish, specifically air breathing fish that have evolved to live in little puddles of water that may dry up or go very low for certain times of the year, fish that have evolved to live in on the margins of things where it might get too warm. So, um, the amount of oxygen in the water might massively reduce. They might get cut off from the main water supply. And you see this with bettas and snakeheads. And those examples are great for it because those little sods will damn near get well. Snakeheads will. Snakeheads will get out and walk to another water source, bettas will jump and they will flap, flip and flap and try and get to the next one. So we know that when they breathe some air, breathing fish can breathe out gaseous ammonia. So they take that ammonia and they literally breathe it out. I have no idea where the curries can do the same because curries are sort of air breathing curries. I mean, a better if you don’t allow a better to get to the surface, it will die. So if you’ve got no surface for snakeheads, for bettas, for things like that, they do end up dying, potentially due to ammonia buildup because they can’t breathe it out. Even if your water’s spot on, I wonder, is something going on there that that, by the way, is me putting two facts together and and having a good guess at it. But it’s fascinating that you’ve got these air breathing fish. Not only can they take in oxygen when oxygen levels may be low, but they can actually excrete their own waste directly into the air. And I just find that absolutely, mind blowingly fascinating. eating. So I mentioned, um, pH. So as I mentioned a little while ago that the safe level is naught point two naught point naught two milligrams per liter and or parts per million. That’s something that you should be happy for your fish to be in pretty much all the time. And they probably are, because even if you have the most mature tank in the world, you feed the fish, they produce the ammonia. It’s going to take some time to get to the filter. It might be a short time, but it’s still going to exist for that time. So as things stand today, we generally tend to say that naught point naught two figure is nice and safe, and everything’s great. To add an extra layer to that, if you have a high pH, more of that ammonia, ammonium will be ammonia. So you’ll hit that naught point naught two very, very quickly. I did a graph this morning at one part per million In total ammonia and ammonium. You didn’t get over the naught point naught two until it was over seven point five pH. And so many people are going to respond to that and go, oh, well, I don’t have to worry about cycling my tank because it’s safe up to that point. No, no, it’s really not. Because if your filter’s not converting the ammonia, the ammonia through to nitrites, the ammonia is going to start building up. And it was at one point one part per million. It’s now at two parts per million and three and five and eight. And we see it all the time. We see fish tanks just being wiped out. So I’m not saying that you can have ammonia in high levels of ammonia in your tanks. Yeah, that naught point naught two is fine. But actually if you’ve got a reading of ammonia and you go, well my fish are fine, the swimming around, it’s very likely you’ve got lower pH. A couple of things are going to happen. One, your ammonia level is probably going to start climbing. That’s problem. And your filter will start to catch up. And it will convert that ammonia and ammonium to nitrite. And all of it’s getting converted to nitrite. There are two different forms of nitrite. And I hate to point it out. The lower pH stuff is a problem. So don’t think you’re completely safe there with that. So you’ve come home. You’ve done your you’ve seen a problem with your tank. You’ve tested and you’ve got ammonia. Don’t panic. Just do a big water change. You should always have water available to be able to do a water change. So if you’ve got a marine tank, even if you’re doing no water change systems, dosing and all that sort of thing, I would still have a way that if the absolute proverbial hits the fan, you can do a water change. For those of us at home with tanks that were just using tap water, great, just do a quick water change. If you’ve had regular water changes throughout the life of your tank, and I always recommend you doing that. The pH from the tap and the tank should match. pH should match both tap and tank. And that means you can do as big a water change as you like. I regularly do eighty percent water changes on my tanks. It doesn’t impact the, um, microbes in my filter because they’re in my filter and I use dechlorinator. The water doesn’t hold these, um, nitrification and denitrification, bacteria and archaea and fungi and whatever else is doing the job. That’s all in your filter. It’s photophobic. It’s only filters. Some will be in your substrate. So if you see ammonia do a big water change. Um, there is many people who claim this phrase. The solution to pollution is dilution, which is a it’s a good phrase, though it’s true. So if you see any ammonia big water change test again. If you can still see any more ammonia test again, because your test kit isn’t reading down as low as naught point naught two. Your test kit, if you’re lucky, is reading naught point two five, which is ten times over ten times the lethal. The lower level, the safe level of ammonia. You’re into lethal then. And you might be going. Well, I’ve got low pH. I’m fine. Yeah, it’s going to be nitrite soon enough. And you’re not. Which I suppose brings us nicely to the next one, which is nitrite. Nitrite, the one with two i’s, not nitrates. That’s got an A in it is one, um, one nitrogen molecule with two oxygen molecules. Now that’s going to do two things. And I think we need to just briefly stop and talk about that. As the ammonia and ammonium becomes nitrite, they lose some of those hydrogen molecules and they go off into the water to cause their own little chaos. And that will start to lower your pH. That’s a crucial thing. We’ll discuss that a little bit more when we talk about hardness. but that’s a starting point. But they will also need oxygen to take on the next process. So if you’ve got a fish in cycle going on, if you’ve got a new tank, you might need to put extra oxygen into the water. And you do that by putting air into the water and some of the oxygen goes off. You’ll often hear people say, bubblers don’t work because the bubbles aren’t in the water long enough. They are. Trust me, they are. If you can get a lot of surface movement that will do the same job. But if your fish is still struggling, try and get an airstone in there just to get as much air in as much oxygen as you can in, and it may manage to drive off some of the gaseous ammonia as well. But now we’ve got nitrites wandering around. Now nitrites now nitrites are genuinely considered safer than ammonia, and I think they are. But the problem is, so much ammonia is locked up as ammonium. That and then it all converts pretty much all to nitrites. Then. Yeah, you can see why that creates a bigger problem. We often see people whose fish do survive the ammonia stage and then start to drop dead in the nitrite stage. I will say some of the bottle bacteria products don’t work. I’m not going to name names, and I’m not saying all of them, but some of them don’t work. In fact, I had one that when I tested it, it took longer to cycle than the fish tank sitting next to it that I added no products to at all. Um, I think I managed to get that fish tank cycled through in about four weeks using a few little tricks. It did exactly the same thing to the tank with the bottle bacteria in, and it took well. I think I gave up at twelve weeks. It never held a steady cycle anyway. So what do nitrates do? Why are they a problem? They replace the chloride uptake. So fish when they breathe in. In effect their gills will take up some chlorides which are needed in general processes in the body. The nitrite replaces that. So that’s the first problem because it’s actually leading to less chloride in the body. But it then goes and converts the hemoglobin, the red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body and are the point of breathing into methemoglobin. So it can’t carry the oxygen. Instead it’s carrying the nitrite. And in humans we have this with a carbon monoxide poisoning. So it’s the same process, except in humans we turn cherry red. When we get that fish turn brown, you’ll see in the gills. It’s difficult to see because they haven’t got as exposed skin as we have. But you’ll see the gills will turn like a sludgy brown in some cases. And it’s why it’s called brown blood disease, because it’s gone from hemoglobin nice and red to methemoglobin this brownie source of color. It also causes endocrine disruption. It does cause all sorts of problems in the long term as well as the short term. But given that the short term effect is normally death, tend not to be worried too much about the long term problems. But if your fish manage to survive the nitrite spike, they’re going to have problems longer term. And like I say, it’s going to cause endocrine disruption that can cause premature death, but it also can cause lifelong problems. We know that salt can be protective. So remember I said it replaces the chloride uptake. Well, if there’s plenty of chloride in there to uptake it can be quite protective. And it will take if it’s available it’ll uptake the chloride first. The problem is you’re going to have to expose your fish to, to to quite high levels of salt and fresh water. Fish are not adapted to have large levels of salt in the water. You can use salt as a medicine. Please don’t be adding salt to your fish tank regularly. I know aquarium shops love it, but a lot of the aquarium shop owners, sadly, are old school fish keepers. And what used to happen old school fish keepers weren’t using weren’t doing water changes because they didn’t have ready accessible dechlorinator. The filtration was completely different. It a huge amounts changed even in the twenty years I’ve been keeping fish. Huge amounts have changed for me, and one thing that used to happen is fish keepers would do changes very, very infrequently. And that causes something called old tank syndrome. So when they did a water change, you’d get the ammonia spike. But because the pH is relatively low, wasn’t as much of an issue. And they add a bit of salt because then that would protect the fish against the nitrate spike. The fish also wouldn’t live very long compared to what we know they can live today, and they wouldn’t breed as readily, and they didn’t look as colorful. They didn’t grow as big. There were problems, and any old school fish keeper who was doing low water changes and adding salt to saying, oh my fish were perfect, isn’t just looking through rose tinted glasses that they’re making stuff up in their mind. And I’m sorry to say that in the modern Fishkeeping era, we have this ability to do water changes when needed. We know how to cycle our tanks without putting fish in. You don’t have to expose your fish to ammonia and nitrites to start it all off. Head over to the website. I’ve got details on there about how to do fishless cycles. It gives you a time to pause, reflect, do everything like that. Now, just as I mentioned before, that just like ammonia has two forms, nitrite has two forms. I’m going to hold my hands up a bit and say, depending on which study you read, either they’ve definitely got two forms and the acidic form is deadly and everything’s going to die, even if they look at it, or the acidic form is no problem at all because it barely matters. So yeah, please feel free to read what you like on that one. So you’ve got nitrite and you’ve got, um, nitrous acid, just an acidic form of one. So if you read the older studies, it says calcium reduces the toxicity of nitrite, but they offer no explanation as to why they’re saying maybe it’s the calcium’s being uptaken instead of the nitrite is that we know that’s not a thing. We know that calcium uptake is its own thing. Some fish do it entirely via the gills. Some fish have very little uptake by the gills. They need it all from their diet. Some can’t uptake it from their diet. It’s a complex thing. Back to there’s no such thing as a fish. So I suspect that the old studies that found that calcium reduced the toxicity actually found that carbonates reduce the toxicity, because the more carbonates you’ve got, the more alkaline your water is likely to be. And calcium carbonates tend to go hand in hand. If you’ve got one, you tend to have the other in a natural setup if you’re adding stuff to it. Yeah, no, that can alter it. But if you’re just getting your standard water calcium carbonates appear in in. I’m not going to say equal amounts, but it’s in the ballpark of equal amounts. The interesting thing is larger fish tend to be more sensitive, and that can be both within a species. So the adults can be more sensitive than the younger fish. But physically, if you’ve got a species that’s larger, it seems to be more sensitive. Again, the studies just completely disagree as to why that is, and I’m not going to pretend to know why it is. One thing to look at with these is let’s take a low pH tank. Um, I’m setting one up right now. I’m going to run it about five pH five, and that means all the ammonia will be locked up as ammonium. And one crucial thing is the bacteria, archaea, fungi, etc. that normally convert ammonia ammonium into nitrite and then into nitrate won’t operate at that level. Generally I’ve had the occasional tank that did cycle it through, but just it was it’s been more of the exception rather than the rule. So I will water change every few days to keep the ammonium levels down. again there. For me, I think the risk levels of ammonium is about similar to nitrates. Nitrates. Sorry, still a problem. I still need to keep the levels low. It’s not going to be massively highly stocked this tank. And like I say, I’ll do regular water changes. It’s not so much of an issue there, but think about the fish that have evolved to live in those conditions. Your Blackwater fish, some of you gourami species, a lot of your tetra species, your species, they’ve lived, evolved to live in these deep black waters with much lower ammonia levels and ammonium levels than we’d ever dream of having in a fish tank. Because the water moves through, they might get locked up in flooded. So when the forest floods in the Amazon, you get the, um, the Igapo forest where they’re flooded and the fishermen go in and collect fish. And we are lucky enough to, uh, be able to buy some of those. And there’s conservation charities that work and all that sort of thing. But these forests flood. They. Then the water levels reduce and fish will often get stuck in. I’m saying puddles. They are big. They are bigger than puddles. They’re small lakes, big ponds. But those water levels will reduce. It’s hot. It’s humid. They won’t have water running through it. So this source of fish has had to adapt to be able to survive in that. And betters and species of fish go through a very similar process in some areas of the world. We’ve discussed about air breathing, being able to get rid of the ammonia straight out of their body, but can you see that they haven’t these species haven’t evolved to have ammonia ammoniums in huge levels, and they also haven’t evolved to live in nitrite rich waters in any way, shape or form, because the bacteria and the fungi and archaea that convert from ammonia to nitrite don’t exist in these conditions. So what you’re getting is you will get some ammonium hanging around that they’ve evolved to deal with. You’re probably not going to get the nitrites, and you’re probably not going to get the nitrates to any serious degree. Fish that have evolved to live in harder water and more permanent water conditions. They might be evolved and they might have methods to get around it. We know that marine fish, for example, salts, like I say, chloride salt, it’s hugely beneficial. So when you see problems in marine fish, you see I think it’s fifty to one hundred times fewer deaths than you do with fresh. It is very much a freshwater problem. Nitrates. Not saying marine keepers want it or marine keepers don’t deal with it, but it’s much more of a problem for freshwater keepers. I’m going to leave it there. I don’t really want to make this a three hour one. Next time I will be discussing nitrates and if I can fit it in. pH people always say nitrates are safe, they’re safer, but they’re not safe. But just a very, very quick recap. And like I say, if you take nothing else away from this ammonia bad, nitrite bad. Try and keep those both at zero on your test kit. Buy yourself a decent liquid test kit to start off with Self-worth. If you get either of them, don’t worry about tracing with salt or adding ammo lock or any of these products. Just get the water out. Get fresh water in. You can do it by getting your siphon started and just tipping the water out, getting it to pump straight out of the window if you can. I use a very long hose to do that, and you can get a hose pipe and put it straight back in. If you’re worried about the temperature attach, get a fitting to attach it to your shower or something like that, or your mixer tap. Just be very careful. It’s better to go in a bit too cold than too hot, because too hot will kill a bit. Too cold may cold shock them, but it’s less likely to kill them. And I hope you’ve got something out of this. Please head over to Facebook or any of the socials we’re on. Um, and let me know what you’ve been thinking about this, where you think I’ve gone wrong, where you’ve picked up on the mistakes I’ve made. If you could leave a review, if you could follow, depending on what your platform is, if you could leave a review, that would be fantastic. And I’ll probably be releasing the bit on nitrates and pH tomorrow. Thanks for listening, guys.
