Drip acclimate or not?

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Wow, thank you. I had no idea.

No problem. Happy Reefing. :)

 

[I never finish anythi]

Float bag for 20min, then plop straight in . No Qt no dripping never had a problem.

 

[TastyScrants]

Coral: temp acclimate, double check salinity, throw it in. I’ve not had a coral (UK based) that isn’t in at or near 35ppt salinity water.

CUC: temp and drip acclimate until 35ppt reached. Usually slow drip over 2hrs maybe longer for specialist/more sensitive stuff.

Fish: I only buy in person. They get a 30min drip acclimation to 35ppt.

 

[lcooksley]

The testing linked below was very extensive using a wide array of test protocols, including the exact way that Seachem recommends testing ammonia when using Prime. The evidence is quite conclusive (IMO) that nothing sold to the hobby binds a useful amount of ammonia at the doses recommended.

taricha's conclusion in the third link:

"The amounts of the active ingredients in recommended doses of these “ammonia neutralizer” products are small, safe doses that are far below the amounts actually needed to do anything measurable to remove ammonia."

Personally, I think the reason so many people think these products are useful is that they overestimate how toxic ammonia actually is. They measure 1 or 2 ppm ammonia, use a product, their fish lives, and they believe it worked, when it reality, doing nothing would also work. These sorts of issues were largely the impetus for my ammonia article: to get folks to see it takes a lot more than 2 ppm ammonia to kill a fish in a few days.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/does-prime-actually-detoxify-free-ammonia-nh3.849985/
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/prime-does-not-remove-ammonia.885857/
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/a...prime-cloram-x-rongalite-and-friends.1064206/

So then of ammonia isn’t so much of an issue in the short term / low levels why do we need to be concerned about ammonia building up in transport bags during acclimation? Is it because the levels in the bags could potentially be extremely high? Seems like putting in clean water to match the temp and salinity of the shipping water also has its issues as other parameters would not necessarily match so whilst the way you suggest eliminates the risk of ammonia is it still not adding more stress to the acclimation process. Why do we make such a fuss about acclimating fish to match salinity when it’s also a practice to dip a fish in RO water to clear parasites. All these things just seem very contradictory.

 

[JonasRoman]

I have noticed a lot of overnight shipping vendors are now suggesting just doing a temperature float acclimation and then immediately transfer them into the tank. Reasoning is when air is exposed and fresh tank water is slowly added the pH rises in the bag increasing the toxicity of the ammonia. Theory is that the salinity/pH shock is far less damaging than the ammonia toxicity and curious what everybody's thoughts are?

I have seen the trend to do this new method for acclimation after overnight shipping and I have done it without issues for a few overnight shipped fish but still see some vendors saying drip acclimation is the way.

I agree, I do the drip acclimation very fast (10 min) if the fish has been in bag for more than 5 hours or so. Of exactly that reason you say, to avoid ammoniak poisoning.

In some situations I have not acclimaticed fish at all , and have never had a lost due to that.

 

[N8]

I don't do slow drips, I've never had any luck with them, I tried several times when I was starting, no luck. What I have found success in is floating the bag for temp, then dumping some aquarium water into the bag, let it float for another 15-30 and then placing the live stock into the tank (discarding of the bag's water).