Water Quality

Making sure our fish have water that is clean and has just the right levels of chemicals is by far our biggest task.  The past few days, our nitrites and ammonia have been high-in the "dangerous" or "unsafe" range.  We get the water chemicals back in check, we do a water change (see last week's post on how we water change) and Friday, Saturday, and today, we also added some chemical treatments to help the levels come back into the safe ranges faster.  

The fish are behaving well, which is the first step to analyzing our water quality.

Next, we use test strips to test these chemicals:

Then, we did a water change.  The kids emptied about 10% of our water, then Mrs. Davis used a kitchen baster to suction up the solid fish waste  (poop) from the bottom of the tank.  

When we add new water, we have to add a chemical to neutralize the chorine that is is our tap water.  Chlorine kills fish.  This chemical called Prime takes care of our chlorine.  We only add about 1 mL of Prime for our new 6 gallons of water.  Today we added 2 mL to try to bring our nitrite level back down to the safe range.  We will do test strips tomorrow to see how it's doing.

After refilling the tank, we then feed the fish. Today, we moved up to the second size of fish food pellets from then DNR.

From our research and looking at our data, we think our chemical levels are part of the natural cycling process that comes with establishing a new tank.

Chart courtesy of the MI DNR Salmon In the Classroom Program.