Acclimation - Safely making your new fish feel at home step-by-step
Acclimation is basically the technique of making sure your fish isn't too shocked when moving from tank to tank or from the wild to your tank. It's basically making your fish feel at home and making sure there are no consequences to the health of your fish afterwards.
As any of you can imagine, being moved from one aquarium to another is a very stressful experience for any fish. If done right this stress can be minimizing as can any possible adverse health consequences for your fish.
So here is your basic, step-by-step guide to making sure that your fish is properly acclimatized.
Firstly, if your fish has been shipped from an online website or has otherwise come from a dark environment then make sure the tank is dark too, at first. Turn off the tank lights and make sure that the room is as dark as you can get it right away.
What you DON'T do is just plunk the fish from the bag into the aquarium. The temperature difference between the bag and the aquarium could be enough shock to kill it. Think "jumping in an icy river".
A better method is to float the bag in the aquarium for fifteen minutes before opening. This, obviously, allows the bag to reach the same temperature as the tank.
After this, you should open the bag and trap some air inside to allow them to float.
If you want to you can move the fish or other animal to another bowl of water or something at this point. Now it has gotten use to the room temperature a little, being out of the bag will help complete the processes.
Another, perhaps better, way of doing this is to begin to empty cups of the aquarium water into the bag with the fish. If you just add a half a cup every five minutes then eventually after about fifteen minutes, the conditions should match perfectly.
Net your animal/fish from the bag at this point and slowly drag it over into the tank. Obviously, you should get rid of the water from the bag that it was carried in. If it was shipped from a seller then it is probably very dirty and deoxygenated. If it wasn't then it still wouldn’t hurt to provide your new pet with some nice clean water.
Observe your new pet for a while in the water. It may be a little lethargic and may not move very much for a little while but soon the increase in oxygen will lea to steadier breathing and it should perk up. Give it a half an hour to an hour to get used to its new surroundings.
If you follow all of the above steps then your fish or other animal should be more than fine in their new tank. The key things to remember are the light levels and the temperature.
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