Re: pH & hydra

[cfonda@sentientconsult.com]

The most logical thing to do is to listen to the advise of your wife.  My
girlfriend was a chem major also, and she maintains the chemistry in our
tanks very reliably.

>From what little I know about Apisto's, they love soft, acidic water.  We
rely mostly on biological systems to keep our pH stable at home.  (Heavily
planted tanks with lots of bacterial cultures and peat in our filters.)  It
seems to work well, with GH between 0 and 3 degrees, KH between 0 and 1.5
degrees, and pH between 6.4 and 6.7 in all of our tanks.

A friend of ours who keeps discus swears by bacterial supplements and peat
in his filters to maintain softness and acidity.  He likes the bacterial
supplements available from Seachem and a supplement called Biozyme.  They
seem to work for him.

I am hoping to convice a pair of agazzii santarem to breed in the near
future and am thinking about using Seachem's Discus Buffer and Neutral
Regulator in combination to get the pH even lower.  (Yeah, it should be a
crime to not list ingredients, though I believe they are supposed to be
zwitterionic buffers, which my girlfriend understands and I do not, but she
says it is OK.)  It should be an interesting experiment.

Hope this helps...  and if any one has advise on how to keep the santarems
happy so they will breed, I'd appreciate it...

Cliff Fonda