What happened?

Hello malik­moloch
Wel­come to the forum. I just approved your mes­sage, from now on it will be vis­i­ble immidi­ately.

I am sorry to hear about your loss of females, — to me it does not seem that the rea­son should be the ph — even 6.2 would not have this effect.
Unless the ph is behav­ing very unsta­ble, or if you have just got the fish and they came from very dif­fer­ent water qual­ity, — or if the adjust­ing time has been too low ?

Oth­er­wise, it would be pos­si­ble also for paros to live in 6.2 ph.

There are many meth­ods of bring­ing down ph — I use oak extract, that is very easy, and it works well for me.

But there are many fac­tors involved also, — in bring­ing down ph, but also in keep­ing it down. Here its also a mat­ter of what other things you have in the tank, per­haps some­thing dri­ves the ph up again .. sub­strate, stones, what­ever …

Per­haps you could tell us more about the set up …

I actu­ally moved your post to Amer­i­can sec­tion, — per­haps some­one will respond with regards to the alfredi question.

Hello every­one and wel­come malik­moloch,

Helene is very right here, more infor­ma­ma­tion on water qual­ity could help. My expe­ri­ence with peo­ple start­ing black­wa­ter acidic tanks is that many are scared of low TDS and so low pH. So they set up the para­me­ters to what they think are low but still rea­son­able lev­els. Sadly, such con­di­tions are the most unsta­ble one could imag­ine and you end up many pos­si­ble sud­den changes. You name it: Dif­fer­ent forms of nitro­gen going back and forth quickly, high bac­te­r­ial load, unsta­ble pH itself. So yes, in sta­ble tank paros could live in pH around 6, but if you are set­ting up a new tank and you are not expe­ri­enced bal­ck­wa­ter aquar­ist, aim for pH bel­low 6 and very low TDS (15−30) with plenty of humic acids and leaf or alder cone extract that will stain it like a tea. Alder cones are great stuff to lower pH quickly and keep it sta­ble + they release great antibac­te­r­ial sub­stances and you will see how paros love such water. Make sure you have zero alka­lin­ity (“car­bon­ate hard­ness” as they wrongly call it) and start with very soft water. The thing is that the “rea­son­able com­pro­mise” here is the worst way to go imo. I hope that helps and cheer up for next and bet­ter try