What Causes Parrot Fish to Turn White?
Usually the parrot fish everyone sees are bright red all over, or yellow or orange, but some fish keepers take their fish home and after keeping them for a while, they find that the parrot fish has turned white. What is going on here?
1. Pigments at work
While parrot fish are at the fish seller's, they are injected with pigment, and after coming home the pigment gradually fades, so the fish slowly turns white. Or the parrot fish you buy were red from a young age only because they were fed feed with added red-enhancing agents; if you do not feed them feed with a red-enhancing effect after buying them, the parrot fish's color will also slowly turn white.
2. Unsuitable water quality
Keeping parrot fish requires slightly acidic water with relatively low hardness, because blood parrots are born with a mouth that cannot heal, and their gill breathing capacity is cut in half. Therefore, breathing through the gills becomes an obvious “fatal weakness”! Once the gills are injured or the process of absorbing oxygen does not go smoothly, it will directly affect the blood parrot's physiological health, and the body color will temporarily fade. Therefore, when keeping blood parrots, compared with other fish, you need to maintain better water quality and provide sufficient oxygen.
3. Deteriorating water quality
Deteriorating water quality can also cause parrot fish to turn white, so when keeping parrot fish you especially need to reduce dissolved nutrients in the water, keep the water clean, and avoid large-scale bacterial growth and gill diseases.
4. Drastic temperature differences
Blood parrots are a fish species that is quite “sensitive” to temperature. The key point is not that the fish body's adaptability to temperature is very poor, but that under low water temperature and drastic water temperature fluctuations, they easily lose their bright body color due to physiological reactions, and may even develop black stripes or markings. Using a heater to raise the water temperature to within the range of 25-28°C can make the fish show bright body color and full of vitality. Fish that live in low water temperature for a long time not only have pitifully poor health, but also easily get sick and die.