Do you acclimate your fish?

[FrozenFins]

Do you acclimate your fish?

[Fish Folk]

53 minutes ago, James Black said:

Do you acclimate your fish?

This depends on a number of factors. Fish are always temperature-acclimated. When parameters are really different, or fish are really fragile, we sometimes drip-acclimate. This video here begins by showing an example ...

I’m skeptical of how much drip acclimation really helps, but it’s never gone wrong for us. Most of the time we just “plop-n-drop.”

[FrozenFins]

2 minutes ago, Fish Folk said:

I’m skeptical of how much drip acclimation really helps, but it’s never gone wrong for us. Most of the time we just “plop-n-drop.”

When you temperture acclimate (such a floating the bag) and then you drip acclimate in a bucket, wouldnt the temperture of the water fluncuate. 

Drip aclimating I think is more common in saltwater because you also have to acclimate to the salinity of the water, and I think SW fish are more sensitive to changes to their water parameters.

[Marc]

What works for me is floating them in a container in the tank they are going in and then adding a few ounces of the tank water every 15 minutes or so until I feel they are ready, could be 30 min or 3 hours.  Length is determined by how different the water parameters are in which they came from and how the fish seem to be doing. A quick test strip gives me an idea.

[Fish Folk]

17 minutes ago, James Black said:

When you temperture acclimate (such a floating the bag) and then you drip acclimate in a bucket, wouldnt the temperture of the water fluncuate. 

Drip aclimating I think is more common in saltwater because you also have to acclimate to the salinity of the water, and I think SW fish are more sensitive to changes to their water parameters.

We actually drip acclimate _in the bag / in the tank_. The video shows it. Tank water in a specimen container is set up on the lid, attach an airline with a valve (or a knot) so that it slowly drips out, and then suspend the fish in _open bags_ in the tank after floating awhile, with ayirstone added. It's tedious. But this way, as @Marc describes, the water can get slowly drawn out of the bags, and slowly dripped in. When fish are packed in pure oxygen though, the gas exchange makes ammonia skyrocket immediately, so it's practically important to get that cleaned out. This is why I really think that a "plop and drop" is virtually the same. 

[Eric R]

"Yes, I thought you had to" is a rather biased answer for a survey.

[Brandy]

7 minutes ago, ererer said:

"Yes, I thought you had to" is a rather biased answer for a survey.

I sometimes deliberately do this at work, it cracks me up to see someone get called out for it. I am dealing with students so getting them to engage is hard. Sometimes the options I offer are "yes, of course I will" and "no way, what, are you on crack?" followed by "I don't care, please just leave me alone"

[lefty o]

absolutely temp acclimate. usually floating the bag 15-20 minutes does the job.

Edited April 16, 2021 by lefty o

[Patrick_G]

I drip acclimate shrimp and just float the bag for new fish. 

[Maggie]

Yes, but I've never purchased fish online, and that might be a different situation needing the plop and drop method.

[Samanthabea]

12 hours ago, James Black said:

When you temperture acclimate (such a floating the bag) and then you drip acclimate in a bucket, wouldnt the temperture of the water fluncuate. 

Drip aclimating I think is more common in saltwater because you also have to acclimate to the salinity of the water, and I think SW fish are more sensitive to changes to their water parameters.

Yes they are more sensitive to changes in water parameters for my freshwater I just temp acclimate

[gardenman]

For me, it depends. As a rule I always temperature acclimate, but there's an exception to the rule. If the fish is clearly in dire distress and the water in the bag is bad, I want them out of that bad water as quickly as possible and even the fifteen minutes or so to temperature acclimate may be too long. Then I just tear open the bag and pour the fish into a net and they go right into the tank. Any fish I get through online sources, I temperature acclimate if the fish are doing okay then plop and drop. I want them out of the bag water and into my water as quickly as possible once the bag is opened. I pretty much plop and drop every fish these days but I tend to buy cheaper fish. If I'd invested more in a fish I might drip acclimate.

It would be interesting to see someone do some testing on how long it takes the water in a fish bag to change once exposed to air. Fill a bag with fish, leave them in it a day or two as if it was being shipped and they're in there breathing and pooping away, then open the bag and start monitoring the change in the water when exposed to fresh air. How long is there before the water starts undergoing significant changes? Do you have ten seconds? Ten minutes? Ten hours? I don't know. You could record the quality of the water when you bag the fish, then immediately upon opening the bag, and then at certain intervals after opening until it stabilized. In a perfect world the bag would have something like an IV bag port where you could draw water from it at various times also to see how it changed before being exposed to air just from the fish being in the bag. 

Testing whether replacing the air in a bag with pure oxygen made a difference or not would be interesting also. A couple of sites I've seen say the oxygen tube should be placed under the water and the bag filled with oxygen in that manner. When I've seen oxygen used to inflate bags it's always just been done from the top of the bag. Testing whether the waste-absorbing filter sponges often used in shipping are effective would be interesting also. Almost everything we "know" about bagging, shipping, transporting, and acclimating fish is anecdotal and seems based on assumptions. Some real research could give us a better understanding of what's truly best.

I've poked around to try and find some research and have found an article from the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program at Purdue University that pretty much says what we all assume to be true. There's also an article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information that suggests that breather bags are better as there's less mechanical disturbance of the fish. (They aren't sloshing around in other words.) There's lots of information on bagging and transporting aquaculture fish but it all seems to be more based on "that's how things are done" than any real research behind it.