Boiling water for twenty minutes is a pretty good way of getting rid of all the dissolved gases. Sure, the chlorine will go, so will the oxygen, the CO2 for the plants, the nitrogen, you name it.
Waste of time, money and energy
No need to boil the water, just shake it a bit and leave it to stand.
And you’ll have used quite a bit of electricity boiling the water, which you now need to re-oxygenise by pouring the water into a 5 litre plastic bottle three quarters full and giving it a good shake. Doing that a few times would have gone a long way to kicking the chlorine out anyway without losing the gases in the atmosphere from the water, and saved your electricity bill.
A more excellent way
If you are doing water changes nice and regularly and therefore in any given day are only changing something like 10% of the water, then the level of chlorine won’t upset most aquarium fishes too much. I never bother with it myself and the fish always look happy enough after a change. Warsaw Poland has a bit of chlorine but maybe there are places where there is a lot more chlorination going on, I don’t know. But if the water is safe to drink from the tap then a ten percent change is unlikely to upset most fish so maybe you are just making a rod for your own back…”
A couple of Saturdays ago I started a series which was intended to reproduce my inputs on Quora over here on this blog, as a repurposing and collating of them as well as a way of making sure I don’t lose my own content. Once again I recently had a warning from Quora just for letting another Englishman know thatt in saying no Englishman likes Donald Trump he took rather too much on himself as there are those of us who do. This was enough to have a second warning from Quora and so now I need to accelerate the copying over of my own work from that site in case I lose all those hours of work and creativity. Where there is moderation, there is limited trust.
At first I did one article per post, but there are quite a lot of briefer answers and it makes little sense to copy these over in that format, so now I have in mind to produce more answers in a single post, based around onne theme, and I have been preparing lists that analyse these articles into common themes. Last time in #3 we took a few articles I had written about Betta splendens, the Siamese fighting fish. These answers gave rise to more questions for me to answer (Quora has A2A, or Ask to Answer where people get invited to answer, either because the person asking knows them or they are suggested by the software. Alternatively you can jump in and give an answer on whatever appears on your screen. If you have opted to receive emails, you get a feed from Quora or items that may interest you) and these questions started to be about fishkeeping or aquatics in more general terms, and even (to be looked at later on) about ichthyology. Inevitably I also started to receive questions about sport fishing and I have zero time for that. I am ready to talk about fishery as part of the food industry, but not about angling, fly fishing or any of these sadistic pseudosports.
Please remember that my answers vary a lot from facetious to informative usually depending on my mood, the time available and what I think about the question. Be prepared for a rather broad range of approaches to questions. Quora goes from highly intellectual Q&A to the dumbest things a human being can write or read. I try to vary my own tone to match the quality of the question.
If you want to discuss or ask anything else around these themes, please get a discussion going in the comments. It’s what the comment facility is there for. I hope it is not onerous to log on and make some kind of utterance.
My own Heros severus.
As mentioned in the title, the theme for today is aquatics, and these answers were given by me all in 2015-2016.
You can always add more food but it is harder to take it out. Give enough for everything to be eaten in a few minutes and feed morning and evening. You can leave raw carrot pieces or washed lettuce leaves – not much – or the skins of fresh cucumbers in there for them to eat more gradually.
Feeding too much will cause a nitrate hike, it has a demand on oxygen and will generally poison the fish as well as cause bacterial blooms and too much growth of algae.
“Here, there and everywhere” by Paul McCartney – karaoke version.
Languages used:
Russian
Animals featured:
Convict cichlids, Archocentrus nigrofasciatus
Date added here:
26 September 2010
Number of days this video was up at time of posting:
1 525
Number of views at time of posting:
4 990
Number of views per day:
3,3
Number of comments at time of posting (don’t forget to click through to read the comments!):
22
Comments per thousand views:
4,4
Likes at time of posting:
6
Dislikes at time of posting:
2
Likes to dislikes ratio:
3,0
Votes per thousand views:
1,6
Ratio of comments to votes:
275%
I can’t watch this and other films of fishes who have since passed on – which in the main they do eventually, without a mixed set of feelings. On the one hand I’m sad that they are no longer here, but on the other the video means that in a sense they live forever.
This was a rogue couple of convicts in the end. Despite the usual claims of good brood care, this pair got to a small clutch of fry about 5 times and on each occasion shortly afterwards ate the lot.
In the first case, I had bought the convict thinking it was a female as my female sajica had died and I couldn’t find a female sajica, but the male sajica will mate with a female nigrofasciatus as they are both Archocentrus. However, despite what the fish-shop owner said (sometimes the bigger expert they seem the more they are making it up as they go along) the convict turned out to be male. He ended up being punished badly by the sajica, so I put him half-dead into another tank with goldfish in. He recovered and killed most of the goldfish before we were even aware of it. So I had to put him back with the sajica. This time, after having had the practice, he killed the sajica. After that I needed to find him a female, which took a long time to do. Here you see the introduction. The pair lived together for a year happily, but George started to get into the tank. It was summer, so we put their tank outside. They were happy in the sunshine too, but one day got too hot for them – which I never expected to happen. They are, after all, from Costa Rica. A sad end, but at least I’ll know to do things differently next time.
