Can I add these pieces of birch driftwood to my aquarium?

Some time ago I collected a large birch log that had been sitting in a local countryside river in Sweden for 5 years.

My current goal here with the wood is to add the wood to create hiding spots along with shadowy areas for my 10 wild caught cardinal tetras.

I want to add pieces of birch wood to my south american 140 liter freshwater setup and as of now I have gotten rid of most of the bark and I also put the wood pieces in a plastic container filled with water for a few hours to loosen the bark.

But for some reason one of the pieces started to smell strangely after the bark was peeled off unlike the other pieces and I am looking for possible explanations because I do not want to accidentally kill my fish and polute the water.



These are the other pieces of wood I got





I am not too sure if I should add these pieces or not and if boiling them is necessary.

When I put the pieces in water they sunk instantly which is good and they are actually surprisingly hard and heavy pieces of wood which is great because the wood should not be murky.

This my first time using pieces of wood for an aquarium and to be fair I am a noob because I only got the above mentioned fish tank which is my first one during january this year.

Would you recommend that I use these pieces of wood or not and in that case tell me why.

I cannot advise on the "smell," but generally speaking birch is a hardwood and should be safe as far as the tree species is concerned. It sank immediately because it is water-logged from being in the local stream...and that brings us to the possible problems.

Pathogens in Swedish rivers are not the same as those in Amazonian rivers. Fish over time build up resistances/defenses/immunities to pathogens thaqt they encounter in their habitat water. If there are pathogens in the wood or water in it, that are harmful to fish, it could be trouble for the cardinal tetras. There is no way to know without testing the water by a microbiologist, so just be aware of it.

Boiling the wood would likely not eliminate all this, and boiling does weaken wood fibres which can make things much worse as the wood breaks down more rapidly.

Byron said:

I cannot advise on the "smell," but generally speaking birch is a hardwood and should be safe as far as the tree species is concerned. It sank immediately because it is water-logged from being in the local stream...and that brings us to the possible problems.

Pathogens in Swedish rivers are not the same as those in Amazonian rivers. Fish over time build up resistances/defenses/immunities to pathogens thaqt they encounter in their habitat water. If there are pathogens in the wood or water in it, that are harmful to fish, it could be trouble for the cardinal tetras. There is no way to know without testing the water by a microbiologist, so just be aware of it.

Boiling the wood would likely not eliminate all this, and boiling does weaken wood fibres which can make things much worse as the wood breaks down more rapidly.

Click to expand...

I am not sure if this would work but I was thinking of putting them in a plastic container with piping hot water for a few weeks with plastic wrapping over the container to maintain the temperature which should at least in theory kill off patogens inside the wood I could be wrong though but it might be worth a try.

I never boil my wood. And that being said, I very rarely go get a piece of wood out of my stream to put in my tank. When I do, I scrub it really good, 5 times with hot water. After that, I soak it in a five gallon bucket holding to down with zip ties. I soak it anywhere from 2-4 weeks, depending on where I found it. I preformed this operation on this piece of wood and it turned out just fine..