What are your parameters part 2
Continuing looking at the water tests that should be a regular part of your fish keeping, looking at nitrates and pH. For beginners and more experienced aquarist alike.
Nitrates are so often miunderstood, they’re seen as being completely safe, but in fact they are deadly at higher concentrations.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Tropical Fishkeeping UK podcast and today you are going to hear me say the word nitrates wrong more often than you can imagine. I keep saying nitrates and it’s not. It’s nitrates I’m talking about today. So this is part two asking the questions what are your parameters and what does that actually mean. And yesterday we looked at ammonia and nitrites. Today we are looking at nitrates and pH possibly get on to other things. But again don’t want to make this too long for you guys because there is only so much you can listen to me talk about this stuff. So nitrates are the end process of that nitrogen process nitrogen cycle we were talking about. So it goes ammonia nitrite nitrates. And you’re going to see you’re going to see lots of YouTube videos and stuff about how you can complete the nitrogen cycle and how you can denitrify your tank and things like that. I’m going to call a bit of BS on that one. The there’s ways, don’t get me wrong, you can create ways in any body of water, in theory, that give the bacteria a chance to take your nitrates and return that to gaseous nitrogen. I’m not denying that can happen. One of the problems is, in general, that’s done in an anoxic environment. So an environment with no oxygen because they are removing the oxygen from the nitrates, they’re using that as a different oxygen source. How this is generally thought to be done is in deep sand beds. The problem is with deep sand beds is you can get something called hydrogen sulfide buildup. You get like black layers. And when that is disturbed or released, it effectively bubbles up into your tank. Or if it just builds up a big enough bubble, it will bubble up into your tank. And that will cause absolute problems with your parameters. And it has been known to kill fish before. So please don’t think that that’s something you can do. You can just put like eight inches of sand in. It’ll cause a deep sand layer. The problem is your nitrates aren’t going to be getting into there in any great amounts, because you’re keeping an anoxic layer and you’re putting a time bomb in your tank. The other option is speciality media. So some media claims that they can do it again. I think what’s happening there is you’re getting anoxic parts of your filter, and when that’s disturbed it’s going to cause a problem. Other than that, I can’t see how it’s happening. And if someone wants to come on and debate the science with me, you are more than welcome to. But you’re going to have to explain it to me. Scientist to scientist. And you’re going to have to give me good reasons. And ideally, if you could send me some stuff beforehand so that I can digest it and go, yes, rather than just sitting there going, and that doesn’t make any sense. So therefore no. So yeah, perfectly happy to debate anybody who wants to. But also you’re going to have to water change anyway. I’m gonna put that out there. Nitrates are not the only reason to be changing water. They are a good one though. So yes, plants can deal with nitrates. But like I say, that’s not the only reason you do water changes. So you’re doing a water change anyway you need. You can get rid of nitrates there. There are nitrate removing resins. But what they tend to do is swap nitrates for something different. And often that’s something different is as much of a problem as nitrates were. If you’ve got high nitrates out your tap, and in the UK, forty parts per million is not uncommon, then plants are a great option. But I am talking about heavily planted tanks where it’s so dense and bushy you can’t see the back of the tank where you’re running CO2, you’ve got Uber dooper lights, and you’re using ridiculous amounts of fertilizer to keep them going. You can do it quite easily with floating plants. To be completely honest, I used a lot of duckweed and that really does help keep nitrates down. My preferred option, however, is just strip them out of the water along with everything else. So if you’ve got high nitrates, then. Yeah, there’s other things going to be in your water as well. And it’s probably well worth investing in an Ro unit or use a spotless water station. That’s one very definite option. I personally have an Ro unit. I strip everything out the water and then I replace it. So I put back in what I want. So one tank just gets acid buffers. Some tanks get limestone flour. It all depends what I’m keeping. But crucially no nitrates. People say what’s a safe level of nitrates? And I’m going to say that that’s very difficult. And I’m really hoping you guys can hear my cat screaming in the background, because her preferred human has gone out for a couple of hours, and how dare they? Anyway, hopefully you can’t hear my cat screaming in the background. So I always say twenty parts per million. And I’m perfectly happy to say that that is a compromise between what’s practical and what fish need. Some fish, I genuinely believe need as close to zero as you can get. We often say that puffers need down at like five parts per million. Some fish can take a lot more, no doubt about that. But I’ve always felt that twenty was a good compromise. Planted tank keepers will always have a number of about fifteen parts per million nitrates in their water as fertiliser for their plants. So yeah, you can see where I’ve sort of got that number from. But there is a lot of science out there. And yeah, I’ve got a few papers up in front of me deliberately to look for and talk about this topic. But let me start on something. Most papers deal with short term. So twenty four hours, forty eight hours, something like that. And until we can measure something and one very quick and easy thing to measure is death. And that’s not what we want for our pets. I’m not talking about food fish here, which have a monetary value, and they’re doing these experiments to make sure there’s no monetary loss. Or when you’re looking at an environmental issue and you need to be able to measure, you’ve got a big factory upstream, chicken farm upstream, and you need to be able to measure and say to people, look, these fish are likely to die because our study shows X when you’ve got pets. And I know this from the cats, the dogs, everything like that, the birds. And I think the fish, we go out of our way to give them a perfect life or as perfect as we can get it. I will happily change my dog’s food if I think it’s giving you an upset stomach and one of the cats will murder you for a particular variety of catnip, she really loves it. The problem is it does send her a bit loopy, so we limit it just like other types. I grow grass in the kitchen deliberately so my cats can have something like that. One of our cats gets really picky about what type of litter is in is is litter tray. Nobody’s going to criticize me for that. Nobody’s going to go, oh geez, you’re being really picky. And your old dog has a stomach upset if you feed it anything that’s got any levels of fat in it. Oh, geez. Yeah. Aren’t you people just go. Make sense? And I think we have to remember that with fish and with fish, we’re not talking about food that gives them stomach upsets or particular types of toys or, I don’t know, one of my dogs loves horses. I frequently take her for a walk with horses. We’re not anywhere close to that level. We are literally going, well, it’s not dead or it’s not showing signs of illness. I think we need to to to wind it back a lot of that and go, we shouldn’t even get close to where they’re feeling ill because of the water we’re giving them to breathe. And I get a lot of pushback off that of a lot of keepers. But I still stand by that. We choose to keep these animals. We should be giving them as good a life as we possibly can. And a toxin is not a good life. That that’s my views. So anyway, what does the study show? So if you go into water, the Journal of Water, Air and Soil Pollution twenty twenty three, then you have a critical review on the effects of nitrate pollution in aquatic invertebrates and fish. Lots of authors you can. I will probably put a link to this somewhere. Nitrate can enter the body of a fish and crustaceans through diffusion. Elevated nitrate concentration in the body affects the food intake, growth rate, swimming performance, reproductive capacity, developmental alterations and survival rate. So I think you can agree that is a list of things that we really don’t want our pet to be suffering with these things. Nitrate toxicity to aquatic animals increases with the increase of concentration of nitrates and its exposure time. So more nitrates are a problem, and the longer they are exposed to it is a problem. Low pH of water also enhances the effect of nitrate toxicity on aquatic animals. At low pH, electrolytes such as sodium and chloride chloride are lost from the body and to balance the electrolyte, metabolic energy is needed. Therefore, simultaneous exposure to both low pH and elevated nitrate concentrations increases maintenance costs and reduce maximum oxygen uptake, which is not a good things if they can’t get the oxygen in were effectively suffocating them. You’re then going to go. Alteration in performance of aquatic animals in nitrate toxicity is because of reduced oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. I will say on this paper, and I totally agree, we shouldn’t be exposing them to nitrates. They seem to be confusing nitrate and nitrates in some areas, but I could be reading that a bit wrong, but they do anyway. So yeah, all negative things for. Yeah. Here you go. Toxicity to fish. Nitrite toxicity. Yeah. They’re doing what I’ve been doing. Anyway, on to this one. There you go. Species specific. Early frei mortality at increasing nitrate concentrations at twenty milligrams per liter of nitrate. Chinook salmon eggs and fry showed significant increase in mortality rate. Rainbow trout fry showed increasing mortality at ten milligrams. Um, so milligrams per liter and parts per million generally can be used interchangeably. There’s some cases, but just just as a rough guide, they’re fine. Steelhead trout had no significant alterations in mortality rates after increasing the dose of nitrates. Uh. Yeah. So some trout, some salmon and trout were suffering at ten, some were suffering at twenty, some were suffering at thirty. And by suffering I mean dying. They then looked at the different ones for some fish that we’d consider in the ornamental trade that included guppies and goldfish. Now, guppies were actually the most sensitive, and that’s something we’ve seen bear out in, like in the groups when we’re on social media and we’re looking at problems. Guppies frequently present in showing a C shape. So if you’re looking at them effectively from above, so you’re looking down at the dorsal fin, it’s almost like the tail and head and tail are trying to touch each other. And they go into this, this characteristic C shape that is probably and generally accepted amongst vets and people online who do this sort of stuff that that is nitrate toxicity and it’s probably spasms due to the nitrates, um, in this case probably reduced oxygen, but also interrupting cell signaling in the body. So effectively they spasm into this C shape. And we know that guppies are one of the first you’ll see it in. We see it more often than I like, although it has got better lately. Guppies for lethal dose lethal concentrations so killed fifty percent of the population at two, six, seven parts per million. And you go, hey, that’s high, I’m safe. I’ll come back to that one a second. Goldfish were a lot safer at over a thousand in static systems, quite a bit under a thousand in continuous flow through systems. So where they were having to work harder and move for they lost a lot of they were a lot more susceptible to nitrates. Okay. So you go like a thousand. That’s way more than I’d ever worry about. Two hundred. Way more than I’d ever worry about how much carbon monoxide are you willing to expose your kids to. And I know that’s one of those extreme examples. You know, your kids are obviously more important than your fish. I’m not denying that they are. But what I’m saying is, if I said to you, here’s a toxin, Um, I’m going to expose your babies to it, but it’s all right. It’s only a tenth of the lethal level. It’ll only make them a bit sick. You’d quite rightly tell me to sod off. And I think we have to worry about things like that with our pets as well. These are lethal concentrations where things drop dead. Illness starts way in advance. And if you looked at the salmon and trout things, it was at about ten, twenty parts per million. Occasionally when I’m reading through these papers, I’ll come across something that does make me go WTF? This one. Uh, and I’ll be completely honest, I’ve downloaded it from somewhere and I’ve forgotten where. But anyway. Nitrate toxicity a potential problem of recirculating systems. And that’s most people working there are Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Virginia Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine seems to be the main people. What they were looking at is in recirculating systems. Um, again there’s that magic two hundred number. Now it’s it’s fish grown in for food. Fish mostly. And here’s a crucial thing. Most of these studies are done on food fish which don’t have to live long, healthy lives. Ideally, they’ll grow quicker. But we’re not talking about long, healthy lives. I mean, one study showed that fish exposed and humans unknowingly exposed to high nitrates are more susceptible to cancers. So yeah, but does that really matter if it’s going to be slaughtered within a few months? No. Not really. So when we’re reading these studies and when you are looking at things like that, please be aware. A lot of it’s food fish. They don’t need to have long, healthy lives. But anyway, they go through all these things and they put some horrendous, uh, symptoms of so they keep some of them at above some of them at above two hundred parts per million. Some are below ten as the control. And they have unusual changes such as going blind and swimming into the tank walls. The blood changed massively. There was massive differences in serum biological changes. Uh, calcium values were all over the place. Chloride values were all over the place. Uh, immature red blood cells were increased. There was all sorts of things going wrong. I mean, and crucially, they went blind and swam into the, the thing. And then at nine weeks they will start doing that awkward thing of dying. We’re talking about death at nine weeks, massive changes at seven weeks, changes in the blood system at four weeks. And again, I’m saying this two hundred is high, but I plan on keeping a lot of my fish for ten years, not nine weeks. And again, it’s the length of time. Keep the exposure much lower and it’s safe over a longer period of time. So yeah, there’s no and I’m always going to say this one, there’s absolutely no number out there that says What’s ideal and what’s not. All’s we can really rely on is our own experience. And more and more we’re being we’re seeing that forty parts per million is too high. And I’ll be honest there. I will say there is a slight little issue with all this test kits in theory. So there’s this whole thing that you’ll hear people say that the API test kit measures differently to the ENT labs test kit. I’ve used both and I’ve frequently used both on the same water sample. So I take a water sample and I split it between two test tubes and then test it both and. Top of my head. I can’t even remember which one retired, one retired. One reads lower the reading, lower one reading high one, the higher one read at about twice what the lower one did. There was this thing that one read just the nitrogen and needed to be multiplied by four to get what the other one was reading. NT labs said No API said no. They read the same thing. Auntie labs example was if you looking at the number of cars, one person, one kit counts the number of tires on the road and then uses that to work out the number of cars. And the other one just looks at the number of cars. It’s still there’s still both numbers telling you the number of cars. So there is that to slightly be aware of. They don’t they’re not brilliantly accurate, but they’re good to telling you whether it’s gone up or down. If you’re worried about it, grab yourself some fertiliser and just work out of the fertiliser. How much is in there? Dilute that down in some water and check. The other thing we do know from nitrate tests is they will give false positives, as in they’ll say all is well when it’s absolutely off the chart. So they tend to go darker and darker and darker, and then they go clear again and they’re fine. Actually, it’s not fine. It’s. Your nitrates are so high, they’re just not reading anymore. And it’ll just give you a test that there’s very low or very little. I’ll be honest, I haven’t sat down and worked out why that is. I just we just see it time and time again. You’ll get someone coming in and clearly you can see the symptoms of nitrate problems. And then you say to them, what’s your test? Oh I’ve only got ten pm and you go, right, can you just do a quarter tap water, a quarter of that and three quarters tap water. And then they come back going, oh, that’s giving me eighty parts per million. And you’re like, yeah, what a surprise. So be aware of that one. How do you deal with it. Incoming water with relatively low nitrates and frequent water changes plants if you can. Uh, I’m running out of words to use plants if you can. Floating plants are absolutely great. Personally, I aim to keep everything below twenty lower if I can. If I’ve got no plants in, I’ll keep it as close to zero as I can. And yes, I end up doing a minimum of fifty percent water changes on all my tanks. That’s fine. I do it for other reasons as well, but that’s a whole different podcast. With all three of these we’ve been mentioning FF and FF is a crucial one, for as we’ve seen, ammonia is a problem at high pH. Nitrites and nitrates are a problem at low pH. Well, they’re both a problem at both ends of the scale. Don’t think they’re that much safer at each end, but they do show even worse effects at the lower end. What is pH? If you see a video, if a teacher told you if someone tells you that pH stands for per hydrogen and just tell them they’re lying. So we don’t know if Carlsberg made water testing, uh, it would be the pH test. It’s a thing developed for checking beer. As with so many things in our life, alcohol was developed in the Carlsberg Carlsberg’s labs and it was never the guy never wrote down what P and H stood for. It’s possible that it just is one of the probes. Um, p h and he he he let it put letters for his probes and pH just was the probe that was taking the stuff in. So it could be something as simple as that. You’ll tend to say per hydrogen, because that’s what it actually means. Acid. Alkaline acid just means it’s got more hydrogen ions floating around, and hydrogen ions will then latch onto something else. H.c.l is hydrochloric acid. The H is just that hydrogen ion. Now, one thing that happens in our water is when it goes from ammonia to nitrite, it loses those hydrogen ions. So it makes things slightly more acidic. If it’s alkaline, it’s got O h minus ions floating around. If it’s neutral, all the H+ ions have joined up with the h minus ions are made H2O, and that’s as difficult as it gets with pH, but it’s logarithmic, which means for every one number you go up, the amount increases by ten. So if you go from seven to eight, the amount of oh minus ions the the hydroxides increase by ten. So if you go from seven to nine two numbers on the scale, it goes up by one hundred. By the way, you don’t measure pH in degrees or anything. It’s just the numbers. If you go from seven to six you’ve got ten times more acidic, seven to five, you’ve got one hundred times more acidic, seven to four, one thousand times more acidic. So the the effects hit quite quickly. So when people go, oh it’s fine. My pH is relatively stable. It’s somewhere between seven and eight. You’re like, that’s a big difference. That’s a huge difference between those two numbers. That’s ten times more acidic or alkaline depending on which way you’re looking at it. This fish needs specific pH ranges. They also need specific hardness ranges, which is a slightly different topic, but where pH and hardness are linked together is that as your hydrogen ions are released into the water, they bind to the carbonate ions, which is your pH, and eventually they make eventually, via various processes, they get released out of the water as carbon dioxide or used by the plants as carbon dioxide. So if you’ve got plenty of K in your water, it will buffer. And that’s why they’re referred to as buffers. It will buffer those hydrogen ions and keep your pH level. But if you’ve got next to no or no K in the water, and a lot of the UK has, if you’re sort of north of Birmingham and a bit across towards the west, you’ve got a better than equal chance of having very soft water. I’ve had K of zero come out the tap near Liverpool. So what that means is, as those acids are being released, acidic molecules are being released into the water. The pH starts to drop drastically when it hits six or below. Generally, those bacteria and archaea, fungi, whatever you’re talking about, can’t convert the ammonia to nitrites, then to nitrates. And we refer to that as old tank syndrome. So then what happens? Your pH carries on. Dropping your ammonia is locked up as ammonium and all is relatively safe. But you’re still going to have to do a water change because you’ve got ammonium floating around. So you do the water, change your pH rockets, back up all that ammonia, ammonium reverts back into some of it, will reconvert back into ammonia. And you’ve got a toxic tank. So your fish then start dying. You don’t go, oh, something went wrong with my tank. You go, it was the water change. It was clearly the water change. And that’s why we get so many people who swear they never do water changes. No. You run this time bomb of a tank where your fish are suffering from ammonium poisoning. But far be it from me to say so. Back to pH. Different fish do need different pH. Generally the K is more important, but given that they go hand in hand together, it’s it’s where the problems come in. Now, where we’ve been talking about ammonia, we’ve been talking about all these things that diffuse across the gills with nitrates as well. So we’ve got sodium chlorides, everything moving around. We’ve also got the H+ ions internally in the fish being moved in and out to help the or mostly be moved out to help the fish maintain equilibrium inside. Remember homeostasis from GCSE biology. If a fish is used to being in or evolved to being in alkaline conditions, it’s going to have different processes for getting rid of those H+ ions than a fish from acidic conditions, which means they may struggle to actually flush the H+ out the hydrogen ions out of their entire bodies. You’ve got all sorts of processes going on. Then some are active transport, some are not. And the amount of H+ and oh minus ions on the outside of the fish can quite heavily adjust the ones internally. Now, are your fish going to instantly drop dead? No. And I truly believe that many, many fish in the wild see certain variations outside the preferred range. I’m going to hold my hands up and say that they will see it for part of the year, and they have systems in place internally to cope with that. But remember, this is coming at a metabolic disadvantage. So what they’re doing is okay, I don’t want to drop dead because of this. I’m going to put some other thing in place. There may be oxidative stress going on there. They may be burning up things in their bodies. We don’t know what it is for every fish. Again, no such thing as a fish. We’re talking generalities. Generalities here. I can’t speak today anyway. Apologies. So what you want to do is you want to do your research and find out what the generally accepted range for that fish is. Then go and find out where that fish is originally from. Because one thing that really annoys me is I go on so many forums or websites and they go, oh well, this fish can take from seven to eight. And then I go and research about it. I mean, I’ll give you a straightforward example, neon tetras. If you are on my socials you will see I’ve just gone and bought a load of neon tetras. I am going to be keeping them at about pH five. In the wild. They’re known to be in much lower conditions. Is that their ideal range? Maybe a neon tetra disease is the thing that makes me say maybe. I think neon tetra disease is caused by taking neons outside the normal parameter range, or they evolve parameter range because I don’t think like something magic happens in their body. I just don’t think neon tetra disease can survive that low. Or maybe we are impacting their immune system in some way. So I’m going to keep them much lower. If I go online, I’m pretty sure I can find somewhere that will say they’re fine up to seven point five. I don’t think they are. I genuinely don’t think they are. And as a keeper, I’d like to keep them in something closer to what they’ve evolved in. Go along and find out what your fish needs in terms of ideal pH. Have a look at things from that side and make sure it’s always worse before you put any fish in your tank before, ideally before you even start the tank. Although most of us have already got tanks before you replace any fish or anything like that. Have a look what’s in your tank and try and find a perfect middle ground for all those fish. Ignore the extreme ends. You’ll often find things that will go ideally from six point five to six point seven, but has been kept from six to eight. You don’t think that means you can keep them at eight? Try and keep them at six point five. If you’ve, however, got another fish that needs six point eight, according to what you’re researching, then yeah, it’s they’re not they’re not completely inflexible. I mean, neons are a great example part of the year. Their native range floods. I can promise you there’s a different change in pH when the floods start and when the floods are receding and all this sort of thing. So as long as we can get it within a reasonable ballpark of what they’ve evolved to live in and keep it relatively stable year round. One thing that I tend to find is as we get towards the end of summer, I run out of botanicals. I don’t have any dried leaves available, so my pH may tick up a tiny bit zero point one point two. That’s fine. That would easily happen in the wild. It’s a gradual change, though. I don’t suddenly shock them with a huge water change that whips the pH up to seven or anything like that anyway. So yeah, pH, it’s just hydrogen ions and oh, ions. Hydrogen and hydroxide. Internally, the fish needs to keep at a particular pH, and it uses various mechanisms to interact with those ions in the water around it buffers. So your pH is what tends to help things hold steady, both internally in the fish and in your water. If you have a very low pH, you might have an unstable pH, which is not good. You might then have to use if you want low pH to use things called acid buffers. So the acids itself hold it within a particular range. But your ideal thing is to I mean ideally keep fish that suit your tap water, but keep checking because the water boards are a bugger for changing your tap. Water’s on you. One day you’re perfectly happy at six point five, and all your pistols and discus and angels are loving it. And next thing you know, they change water source and you’re at seven point five and wondering why your fish are dying. That’s why before every water change, at least check your KHOU purely with me. It depends on what test case I grab out first, because one of them has an easier thing than the other. Anyway, guys, I’m going to leave it there because I feel like I’m starting to waffle. Next time it’ll be next week. We’re going to look at hardness, because that is a question that we get loads and loads on. There is always the possibility of a rant at some point between now and then. But thank you so much for joining me. If you can follow us everywhere you’d like to, um, head over to the website. I’m going to be launching some sort of newsletter thing soon, so keep your eye on the website on that one. And if you could give us a like on our various socials, we are tropical fish keeping UK on Facebook, Reddit, blue sky, Instagram, TikTok. Yeah, I think I’m Tfk UK on Tik Tok, blue sky I might just be tropical fish keeping. Check the website. I’ll put it all up on there. Thank you so much guys and I will see you next time.
