Glass cat temperature range

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Lycosid
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Glass cat temperature range

Post by Lycosid »

I maintain a large group of in my research lab. Today my research assistant and I pulled the heater out of the tank to fix the heater shield. We'd been debating the temperature set point for these fish and so I looked at the heater setting. It was at 88 degrees Fahrenheit. The cat-e-log says 78.8 should be the upper range of tolerance. (Ironically, minutes earlier another research assistant had touched the water in the tank and said, "Wow, this is the warmest tank!" and I'd said something dismissive about tropical fish.) There are three reasonable options as to how long the heater has been set this high: a few weeks, having been bumped when we added the shield, a few months, having been set wrong when we moved the fish to the new tank, or more than a year, since bought it.

All the fish in the tank have been looking healthy and active (and I do look at them regularly to monitor their condition). As I see it, this leaves two possibilities: the fish would have started to look ill and die soon, or that glass cats can actually tolerate a good bit more heat than we have listed here.

I'm posting this mostly so that it's on the record. If more people have accidentally kept glass cats long-term at high temperature then we'll know that they are tolerant of these temperatures. If someone has cooked them at these temperatures instead we'll know I was lucky to catch this in time.
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by Bas Pels »

88 F = 31 C.

As the fish are from Thailand, that is, very tropical, I would not be surprised they have managed this temperature for a few months. I think the dry season would have watertemps like this every year.

Aquariumbooks have been written in the 1950s, and since then mosly been reused again and again.

Keeping subtropical fishes, I've learned to ignore the temperature advises in such books. I mean, if I go to south Uruguay, where the average temperature all year is 16 C, but a book suggests keeping ther fishes at 18 to 24 C, do you think I believe the book?????

I'm not surprized the books are wrong in the other extreme too
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by Lycosid »

I thought something similar. The coastal Thai drainages would seem to be pretty warm places and shallower water heats pretty quickly. Another Kryptopterus species has been found in water that averaged almost what my tank was at, but of course species in a single genus can be very different.
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by N0body Of The Goat »

Only the 150cm tank in my poorly insulated garage, covered by numerous bubblewrap and blanket layers containing my Illydon xantusi (feisty Mexican goodeid livebearer) colony, has an active heater in it (which is set to ~18C if I recall correctly) from November to March.

My five indoor tanks all run without a heater, their temperature changes through the seasons and the ambient temperature of the rooms (in the recent cold snap, we had had the storage heaters on most nights). Typically, this will result in the tank temps varying between ~18C and ~29C (depending upon an "extreme" heatwave) through the year, but normally they are ~21C.

Yet most of my indoor fish are what most would consider to be "tropical," with the odd species being what I would call "low end tropical" (Chaestostoma spp.; Brachydanio rerio; Barbus fasciolatus). The "tropicals" (including my Congo basin mochokids; Distichodus; Alestopetersius; Phenacogrammus; Pareutropius mandevillei, plus several oddballs like Ctenopoma; Pantodon; Xenomystus etc.) don't behave noticeably different during the winter months compared to when I used to always run heaters, which saves my limited disposable income and I actually think it does the fish a lot of good (by not having their metabolism running at "110%" all year round).

My approach changed after reading http://www.seriouslyfish.com/whaddaya-mean-too-hot/ a few years ago.
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by Bas Pels »

A few years back, just before I went to Uruguay, I gave all my taks a good waterchange. In the large tank (all cichlids from south Mexico, youcatan area) I forgot, however to replug the heater.

A month later, just back, I noticed the fish were not all too happy. So I scheduled a large waterchange, but firtly I needed a good night of sleep. The following day, starting the waterchange with unpolugging the heater I saw what was wrong.

The temperature was dropped to 19 C, but easily returned to the 26 C I kept them on.

The result? No deseases, noone died, but a month later I had a lot of fry

You can imagine next winter I rescheduled the heater to 24 C, 22 C an 24 C for a month each. A bit saver, obviously. But quite cool, better for the wallet and for the fishes, I think.

Put differently, Fish living outside the tropics - I mean 23 south to 23 north by tropics, such as fish from south Mexico, have a winter in nature. This winter can be short, but it does excist. And if yoou want to keep the fish properly, I think you should respect such a winter. And it does help keeping the hobby affordable.
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by Lycosid »

I've been poking around in the hopes that there is some clear, defined relationship between water temperature and some other set of variables that one can find from internet data (and not from having to physically visit the location various tropical fish are from). The answer seems to be that there isn't a clear one, although maybe stream discharge and air temperature together can be used to create a viable model. Of course most models are tested in temperate areas....

However, if we assume that small/shallow bodies of water equilibrate to their surroundings and further assume that the average monthly temperature in air predicts the water temperature in these smaller bodies of water for at least the latter half of that month we can now use data available from sites like Weather Underground to find high and low temperatures in actual bodies of water our fish come from. In this case, if I take Phuket, Thailand as a site with active weather monitoring near where glass cats are found I find that the slow, shallow waters they come from probably hit 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29.4 Centigrade) in February, 2004. Obviously the species survived this.
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by panaque »

Even visiting the 'natural' habitat can be misleading. I see many examples of aquarists' collecting trips where the water bodies being fished are in more or less deforested areas. These waters will be much more exposed to the sun than those under forest cover. As an example, I've measured a small river in a Borneo forest several times and it is always 25-26C. The same river further downstream, after it has run through 2 km of deforestation, is 29C at 4pm (25C in the morning). Fish collectors tend to visit these disturbed sites because they will be nearer roads. They might think 29C is the natural temp for the species they collected (and would
match air temperature) but actually it is an extreme that some species may tolerate for part of the day but that is much higher than what they evolved in and are optimally adapted to.
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Re: Glass cat temperature range

Post by Bas Pels »

@ Lucosid, I once gave a presentation regarding precicesly that subject - what does the atlas tell us about how to keep our fishes.

An atlas tells you the longitude, altitude and in some cases abouth the ground.

If you realize that the intensity of the sun equals the square of the sinus of the longitude on a given moment (on 21 June deduct 23 degrees for the place of the sun, on the northern hemisphere, on 21 Dewcember add these 23 degrees. The other days are a matter of gonio). Than you only need a factor.

In Manaus, Brazil, the temperature is yearround around 26 C. Manaus is 34 metera above sealevel. In Nairobi this value is 20 C, and Nairobi is 1000 meters above sea level.

So on the equator you only need the altitude to know / more or less / the correct temperature.

As the intensity of the sun is the sqare of the sinus, it will not matter much if you go 15 degrees north or south. Sinusing will take away a lot of the differences and squaring will take of almost the rest.

BUT in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, if I remember correctly 30 degrees south, you see 9 months of tropical wheather, (in our winter the sun is south, and thus A is quite tropical for 9 months) but the other 3 months are cooler.

Going further from the equator, winters get longer, and colder.

Then there is something like shading. Forest shades the water, resulting in lower maximum temperatures and higer night values - shading more or less covers the water.

Finally, with regard to hardness and pH, rain used to be the same everywhere. Any differences are due to pollution form human origin, and that for only 200 years max. Too short for any evolutionary adaptations. So, rain falling in a forrest will never reach the bedrock, that is, it will not dissolve minerals but dissolve organic matter instead. But when it falls o nbedrock, it will mineralize, it gets hard, with a more neutral pH. This does not explain why the pH is 4 here and 6 there, but it gives you a direction.
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