HPWesley73 (Part Three)
John consulted his old Potions and Charms notebook to see if there were any clues as to what could be ailing his fish. There was nothing specific, just the old mumbo jumbo about PH levels and water hardness and a litle bit about ammonia formation. He was pretty sure that the new filtration system had taken care of all those things. It still did not explain why his koi should be moping about at the bottom of their newly pristine bowl.
John finally concluded that logically since they had been all right the day before he turned on the new filter, the thing to do would be to try turning it off and to wait and see what happened.
Lo and behold, when he returned home during lunch break at the office, he looked and the koi seemed much more responsive. They jumped to the surface as soon as he removed the cover to feed them. "What on earth" he wondered, "could be making the difference?"
Surely, the fish could not be telling him that they preferred to swim in their own shit? And yet, sure enough, even as they leaped and grabbed at the brightly colored floatig pellets, the water was turning a pale shade of sepia.
John decided to consult the Wiznet, that portion of the World Wide Web secretly consigned to sorcery (it had long since taken the place of his old Hogwart's textbooks.) And, there on one wizard's blog space, it was explained that koi indeed shit about three times the amount of waste as ordinary goldfish and that extra precautions do have to be made in order to confine them properly under artificial conditions.
The blog entry went deep into the "nitrogen cycle" which was a subject he had slept through in Muggle Chemistry and Mundane Physics. But, it did provide one possible explanation for what was going on inside his ornamental Chinese bowl.
Fish and plant waste products do have an effect on PH levels, especially over time. And, it is possible for fish to acclimate themselves to those levels. Any sudden changes can result in fish, or in this case -- koi stress.
John decided to test this theory by measuring the PH in the water fresh from his tap and was astonished to find that it was much higher than the water in the bowl. Apparently, all of that fecal matter had robbed the water of enough oxygen to tip the nitrogen cycle into reverse, creating more acid instead of carbon molecules and driving the PH levels down.
The koi had simply grown accustomed to a low PH level.
When John had turned the filtration system off, the koi's waste products began to drive the PH down again, making them a bit more alert. John decided to leave the filter turned off until he returned home from dinner with his friend Gary from Portland.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
John finally concluded that logically since they had been all right the day before he turned on the new filter, the thing to do would be to try turning it off and to wait and see what happened.
Lo and behold, when he returned home during lunch break at the office, he looked and the koi seemed much more responsive. They jumped to the surface as soon as he removed the cover to feed them. "What on earth" he wondered, "could be making the difference?"
Surely, the fish could not be telling him that they preferred to swim in their own shit? And yet, sure enough, even as they leaped and grabbed at the brightly colored floatig pellets, the water was turning a pale shade of sepia.
John decided to consult the Wiznet, that portion of the World Wide Web secretly consigned to sorcery (it had long since taken the place of his old Hogwart's textbooks.) And, there on one wizard's blog space, it was explained that koi indeed shit about three times the amount of waste as ordinary goldfish and that extra precautions do have to be made in order to confine them properly under artificial conditions.
The blog entry went deep into the "nitrogen cycle" which was a subject he had slept through in Muggle Chemistry and Mundane Physics. But, it did provide one possible explanation for what was going on inside his ornamental Chinese bowl.
Fish and plant waste products do have an effect on PH levels, especially over time. And, it is possible for fish to acclimate themselves to those levels. Any sudden changes can result in fish, or in this case -- koi stress.
John decided to test this theory by measuring the PH in the water fresh from his tap and was astonished to find that it was much higher than the water in the bowl. Apparently, all of that fecal matter had robbed the water of enough oxygen to tip the nitrogen cycle into reverse, creating more acid instead of carbon molecules and driving the PH levels down.
The koi had simply grown accustomed to a low PH level.
When John had turned the filtration system off, the koi's waste products began to drive the PH down again, making them a bit more alert. John decided to leave the filter turned off until he returned home from dinner with his friend Gary from Portland.
[TO BE CONTINUED]