i am a chiclid owner

[greenman909]

i have 6 African chiclids and 1 pleco and i am fairly new to raising freshwater fish ant advise anyone can give would be great

[greenman909]

and also is the recommended PH level at 6.6

[Gourami Swami]

What size tank do you have, what kind of fish do you have (african cichlid is a very general term nowadays), whatsn your setup like, etc?

Need to know a few thins before giving advice.

[emc7]

also is the recommended PH level at 6.6

what is? Who recommended? How are you changing the pH? Malawi fish would prefer 7.5.

[Betta1]

I've got my Tanganyikan tank buffered to 8.4+, 7.5 sounds low to me and 6.6 sounds horrible

Greenman do you know which africans you've got? Probably malawi, if so they prefer a mostly vegetable diet ie algae, don't feed them much protien or they can suffer from what is known as bloat, protien sits in the stomach undigested and causes the fish to bloat up. Protien would be things such as mysis blood brine shrimp. New life spectrum is a very good cichlid food as it has a good balance of plant mater and protien.

What kind of pleco? Common? As plecos get older they stop eating algae and start eating protien.

What size tank?

[Eraserhead]

Our water comes out of the tap at 8.4, so it's pretty much perfect for Africans. I'm in Indiana, and we get our water from an aquifer, with a lot of limestone in the ground. Lucky us!

[shade2dope]

From pic in avatar it lookslike maybe a female aurtis blue ali and iam not sure post what you have

[joe kool]

the tank in your avatar looks like you got fish from the "mixed african" tank at your LFS. The recommended ph IS NOT repeat NOT 6.6 and you should go punch the person in the face that told you that ... eerrrr well at least go complain to the manager that you were given VERY bad advice. I would say no less than 8 ph most that come in a mixed african batch are around that range.

google "Atlas of Freshwater Aquarium Fishes" I recommend you find this book in your library or LFS and look your fish up so you know what they are and what conditions they need to thrive. there are other books that are strictly on africans that will work but this one will have a great variety if you expand your inhabitants. here's a link to a review of several cichlid books: http://www.malawicichlidhomepage.com..._malawi_1.html

hope that helps.

[emc7]

7.5 and up is good for Malawians. I didn't mean 7.5 was ideal, just that it was a better target than 6.6. 200ppm TDS is good, too.

[joe kool]

true emc but most beginner aquarists don't realize that The pH scale is a log scale and was defined as such to replace the less convenient molar concentration scale. The pH scale simply ranges from 0 to 14, and each pH value corresponds to the power of 10 in the molar concentration. A change of one pH unit changes positive hydrogen ions [H+] by a factor of ten. For example, [H+] for a solution with a pH of 1 is 10 times larger than a solution having a pH of 2, 100 times larger than a solution having a pH of 3

Simply stated its 10 times more alkaline to go from 7 to 8 ph values. now I'm just a simple man but I think if anything that I had to move around in and came in contact with changed it's value 10 X's greater or less than it is or that I'm comfortable at I'd be pretty ticked off ... if alive at all. imagine if the temperature increased by a factor of 10, wind, pollen, amount of smoke in the air, anything really.

so an increase of ph even by 1 ph value is having a HUGE impact on their world that they swim, live, and breathe in.