• Question: Why are fishes not able to survive in distilled water?

    Asked by devan to Bob, Katie, Nisha, Sallie, Vee on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Sallie Baxendale

      Sallie Baxendale answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Purified water is used in freshwater and marine aquariums and that’s why they need filters to remove impurities like copper and chlorine, phosphate and silicate. it helps to keeps fish free from diseases, and avoids the build-up of algae on aquarium plants.But distilled water has had ALL of the impurities removed – and fish need many of the macro- and micro-nutrients in mineralised water to survive.

    • Photo: Bob Bonwick

      Bob Bonwick answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      distilled water has no minerals or other disolved/suspended goodness fish need to survive. It’s not all about the oxygen in the water; did you know that water has the most oxygen in it at about 4 degrees C.

    • Photo: Vee Mitchell

      Vee Mitchell answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Distilled water gets it name from the distillation process that it used to be put through to get rid of all the dissolved ions and salts it has – it picks these up from it’s journey through rocks, rivers, lakes and even the pipes into your house. Now we tend to make distilled water using ion exchange filters (a bit like the filter you have in a home water purifier) rather then lengthy distillation. All living things require the salts and trace metals found in water not just fish. So why do we distill it – well our kettles and irons don’t like it if you live in hard water areas as you get limescale forming which stops them working well. In the laboratory we use distilled water to make sure we know exactly what it is in our solutions for our experiments – even tiny amounts of copper or chlorine could have a big effect and mess things up.

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