Brady brought me 5 new koi from his fish farm near Charlotte, NC, yesterday on my 65th birthday, a little deal Lizzie had arranged.
When Brady started to dump the shipping bags, I told him to leave them there, I wanted to check the actual ammonia levels in the shipping bags before dumping the water.
I measured the ammonia level on two independent test kits, specifically the Lamotte fish farm test kit, and the Hanna colorimeter test procedure. Both were off the top of the scale as I expected, the top of each scale is 3 ppm. So I did the chemist 5 to 1 dilution of the sample and retested, the 5 to 1 dilution tested at 2 ppm on both test procedures, meaning the ammonia in the bag was at 10 ppm.
I tested the pH on a Hanna colorimeter test procedure, the value was 6.7, and that agreed approximately with the Lamotte pH test procedure.
So the fish were bagged at 7 AM at Brady's farm, taken out of the bag at 2:30 PM at my house, and had an ammonia bath that built to 10 ppm in that shipping procedure. And the pH dropped to 6.7 as the koi exhaled Carbon dioxide to drop the pH in the shipping bag.
The toxicity literature for fish and ammonia levels for carp, meaning in our instance koi, indicate it takes 4 ppm ammonia levels at a pH of 8 4 days to start killing off the koi. But at a pH of 6.7 in a shipping bag 10 ppm for a half day is no big deal.
What is the point of the thread? While we don't want to see measurable levels of ammonia in our koi ponds, the fish will live through them if the ammonia levels are not chronically there long term. There is no reason to panic and do huge water changes at ammonia levels in the 0.25 ppm to 0.5 ppm range. Okay, you may want to think about spending some money on ammonia binders when the ammonia is in the 1 to 5 ppm range during a new filtration system cycle of a new pond or quarantine tank, chemically binding the ammonia makes the water better for the fish.
In my filtration learning days, when I ran a huge fish load on our indoor koi pond, I measured the ammonia level to be in the 0.2 ppm range for one 15 month period continuously. None of the fish got sick, I did not use an ammonia binder.
The only point of the thread is to put up REAL data so ponders do not hit the panic button when they measure levels of ammonia in their ponds at the 0.25 ppm level.
Discussion?