The best way to think of water is like the air that we breathe properly. But how long does it take for the air to change through our influence, multiply that by 100+. Think of the heat, for example. When your place gets too cold, turn on the heater or start a fire on the living room floor (depending on how desperate you are) and it’ll warm up nicely in an hour. Let’s take water in the same volume as your house and try to heat it in an hour.
So yes, test, test, test, test, test, test before you do anything. Remember that anything you do to the water now will take time to have an effect. Even adjusting the pH (depending on gH and kH) will take time.
Taste the water you are about to put in!
You see your little friend looking gloomy in the corner and you go…
“Quick doctor, give him a drink of some new water that’s loaded with Nitrate and Nitrite, that will surely remedy the situation! Stat Stat Stat!”
So you don’t notice any change and think, okay, the first diagnostic didn’t work, so let’s put more food in the tank. Now adding even more ammonia and chewing up more oxygen. Ok Ok, that obviously doesn’t work.
“Let’s try the water document! What a brilliant idea, Watson! You’ll get your readings, and because of all the previous dabbling, the readings will tell you absolutely nothing about your original problem. Even better, you now have another set of problems with those to deal with.”
Flushing is simply not the answer and should only be used after testing and if you are sure you have a time-dependent seizure. Most exposures to things like ammonia and nitrite will take more than 92 hours to kick in, unless you have outrageous spikes of more than 5,5,100 in a high pH solution. Only the complete lack of oxygen in the water and chemical toxins from outside the water will require immediate action.
What can you do in this situation?
Calm down first. Double check the readings to be absolutely sure there is a problem and test correctly.
Nitrite, which is a salt of nitric acid which is HNO2, not NO2 because it dissolves in water and binds hydrogen ions (not good). This binding to hydrogen ions reduces the amount needed to maintain a normal or neutral pH, so your pH should be low (acidic). If the pH is low, leave it there and definitely DO NOT add water.
It is the sudden shock in pH that will kill them before the nitrite hampers oxygen metabolism as a result of lots and lots of free radicals circulating in the system called (RNS) Reactive Nitrogen Species. These are a group of nitrogenous radicals. Based molecules and one of these lovely ones is nitrous acid, go figure. So what your crayfish is going through is called nitrosative stress, which leads to nitrosylation reactions in your crayfish that will alter the structure of the protein, thus inhibiting normal functions like oxygen metabolism.
You can also have the opposite oxidative stress of big little radicals like nitric oxide, but that’s not the case here. I just want to point out that crayfish are NOT fish and do not have the same sensitivity as most fish. You will find them much tougher than fish.
Neutralize the acid first if you get nitrite readings above two consistently for 2 days testing morning and night for a total of 4 tests before doing anything else. NaHCO (sodium carbonate or bicarbonate salts) will neutralize most of the weak acids in the water, where they will still be present, but no longer negatively charged, so to speak.
The remaining nitrite will still read on your nitrite test, which means the nitrifying bacteria can continue their normal function since you haven’t completely eliminated what they like to feed on.
The real test is in your pH. If your nitrite and nitrate level is high, your pH must be low. If the acids are neutralized and you still read, but your pH is neutral or high, then the job is done and the nitrite poses no additional threat to the scab.
I’m not sure if I explain it very well as it is my tendency to go off on a tangent when I talk about chemicals and reactions as they never really stop. The bottom line is that if you add new water you will add more problems and even more reactions. Water takes longer to move than air, so the changes you make aren’t instant – take your time and try the test.
