Re: Gill Fluttering?

> >While other things could be happening at the same time, the effect has
>>been documented (my understanding) as being due to the thickness (or was
>>it pressure?) of the gill membrane's cells, which develop according to
>>the water's hardness. Whether this particular author observed it or not
>>is a matter of degree, and the stress he noted is very much the worser of
>>the two. I became acutely aware of this with my pet shop on soft water,
>>and my home (and that of many clients) on hard water. The soft to hard
>>transition was difficult, the hard to soft was more in the disasterous
>>category. Of course, the magnitude of the effect depends on the
>>difference in hardness between the source & destination. ymmv

>
> Yeah, first you have to rule out other things but here's what
> Scheel said in _ROTOW_ (P 24-25): "Thus, some of us have to use different
> sorts of water for our killifishes butthis does not represent
> any serious problem.
>
> If you move rivuline individuals from a water containing much
> dissolved mineral matter to water containing little such matter,
> these individuals probably will soon be swimming at the surface
> and they soon die. If you inspect the gills under a microscope you
> will realize the reason for this. You will find the gills completely
> ruined. The many brittle cells of the gills burst shortly after the
> individuals had been placed in the water of low salinity because
> of the large differences in osmotic pressures. If fished are moved
> from water containing little dissolved mineral matter towater containing
> much such matter nothing will usually happen."
>
> Then on P26: "Differencesin pH values, even from 5.0 to
> 8.0 have not produced any harm when individuals are suddenly moved
> from one type of water to the other."
>
> (Ref: Scheel, Col J.J., Rivulins of the Old World, TFH Press, 1968)
>
> In the face of contradictory anecdotal evidence I would want to
> ruls out all other factores first before I claimed moving
> fish from soft to hard water was problematic.
>
> As an aside, I found Scheels grandson who knew "grandad kept fish"
> but was totally unaware he was one of the top dozen aquarist
> in hs day and the most respected killi gu in his day; in his
> 20 years keeping these fish he contributed more to our knowledge
> of them than, arguably perhaps, the total of all killi hobbyists
> since then.
>
> The first (?) fish specialty society was the American Killifish
> Association in 1961 and back then it was nothing more than
> people exchanging letters. Scheel began sending out letters
> to a handful (?) of other "killifans" in the 1950s then stopped
> to compile all his work into a book - ROTOW - but had set the
> stage for a "virtual", that is, "mail in" aquarium/fish society.
>
> His original letters have been preserved through time and I
> coaxed some old family photos from his grandson to annotate them
> and you can see them here:
>
> http://new.killi.net/articles/by_Author/Scheel/
>