Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
Water for Fish or Fish for Water?
So i've been wanting to setup a new tank and i've been doing my research and planning etc and it got me thinking...
Are you better to alter your water to suit the fish you want? Or alter the fish you want to suit the water you have?
Which is easier to do? Less expensive? Takes less maintaining?
For example, my water straight out of the cold tap is KH 15 GH 18 PH 7.4
Am i better off in the long run only keeping fish whose requirements meet my water conditions?i know that i can use several different methods to change my water chemistry so i could keep Amazonian fish for example. However i'm not sure if i'm good enough to keep those conditions stable?
any and all thoughts?
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but again as i said in the first post i'm still not sure if it's a good idea to go tricking around with the water?
You make a good point hammie, when you get to 6th, 7th, nth generation how dependant are those fish on the conditions that they are found in in the wild? I have no idea and it's a good question for someone who knows to answer
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The moss peat in the external filter should soften things if required also some in the water change bin won't hurt either.
Small hijack here:
hammie if you are coming to kerry I may have to give you a small shopping list
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I tend to spend most of my time on fish-question pms on this topic (although questions on Bettas come in pretty hard and faST).
Let's put one group of fish to bed........marine keepers don't quite have a choice of hoping the fish will tolerate the tap water:
that is case where water is changed to suit the fish.
On freshwaters, there are very very few fish that demand conditions very close to their natural habitat.
That number of species, however, does increase when considering breeding certain species.
Now, the main problem of trying to get "perfect water" (oooh....I do hate that term
) is that fish that demand certain water conditions for keeping or breeding are most usually ones that demand parameters other than what folk focus on.By focusing on one or two parameters as targets it is so easy to take some other parameters well off scale.
eg I see keepers adding this that and the other to water to decrease pH yet fail to recognise the unbalanced increase in oxidation potentional or increased conductivity.......recipe for disaster.
Soft approaches such as addition of peat to increase acid content (even if it doesn't change pH) or using coral gravel as a buffer are, however, good and recommended as appropriate.
Other than that, I tend to recommend water changes over messing with water.
ian
Irish Tropical Fish Society (ITFS) Member.
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