On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 07:42:56 +1000, "Paul" wrote:

I read alot of people say that salt will help this problem, so by all means
try that, but it didn't really help me. Consider if you add salt the tank,
you'll need to add the same amount every time you do a water change.

Keep in mind that salt doesn't evaporate with the water, so if you
kept dosing the same amount every time you did a water change, you
could end up with a high concentration of it.

As an extra precaution, I treated with a product designed to kill flukes and
worms, I forget the name of the chemical, but that also helped to stop the
scratching.

I wouldn't use any medication "just because". The ones that are used
for flukes and whatnot generally have copper in it, which in high
concentractions (and it's not that high for fish), can end up killing
your fish, snails AND plants. Inverts beweare.

another reason you might get this problem is if you try to make your water
too hard but piling in alot of stuff like baking soda etc.

Sodium bicarbonate will only raise the pH to a certain point where it
will cap. It would be quite a feat if you managed to make your water
"too hard" by just adding baking soda.

if the fish were raised in gh 50ppm, and you throw them in at the "proper"
150-200ppm, they aren't going to like it.

It really has nothing to do about how the fish are raised, and
everything to do about how quickly you raise water parameters - that's
why you ensure that you raise water properties such as pH, GH and KH
slowly to acclimatize the fish to these new conditions.