Your fresh water aquarium
Do you have a stressful life, high blood pressure, insomnia? Keeping an aquarium may be good therapy for you. Contemplation of fish in an aquarium seem to have a significant effect in reducing levels of stress and anxiety.
Another reason for incorporating and maintaining a aquarium in a home or office is the enjoyment aspect. The fascination and beauty encountered on the coral reefs of the world or in the fresh water lakes or rivers, teeming with life, vivid colors, coexisting together can exist right in your living room.
Here we will give a few basic advices on how to start an aquarium and on how to maintain it.
First we will talk about the aquarium placement and setup. Avoid direct sunlight which will skyrocket water temperature and cause algae blooms. Glass cannot tolerate uneven weight variance so use a proper aquarium stand. If you are making your own stand or placing it on a tabletop, place layer of Styrofoam under the aquarium to absorb stress and slight angular distortions.
Besides the actual aquarium you will need a filter, gravel, a source of artificial light and a thermometer.
As a substrate you can use sand or gravel. If you decide to have an aquarium full of natural plants, you will need to use under the sand or gravel a special fertilizing plant substrate that can be bought in pet shops. And whatever your choice, the substrate should be cleaned once a week to prevent the deterioration of water quality.
Sand should be rinsed multiple times or else it will cloud up your tank for a while (and even with rinsing there may be some temporary cloudiness). Sand is actually easier to keep clean than gravel as gravel offers many small spaces for leftover food and waste to hide and potentially foul the water if not cleaned properly.
Gravel is easier to prepare: usually just rinsing it off a few times in hot water is sufficient.
Filtration is very important for any aquarium. You generally want a higher level of filtration than your tank size. So if you have a 50 litre tank and your filter is rated for aquariums up to 50 litre you may want to invest in a larger filter.
There are many types of filters: under-gravel, hang on the back, internal and canister (external). The canister ones are the most efficient, but also the most expensive.
Your filter should have, in order to be more efficient, several types of filter materials such as different types of sponges, filter wool, ceramic or plastic balls and even charcoal. The ceramic or plastic balls are used as a surface for the bacteria that remove ammonia. The charcoal filter is used mostly for removing medication from the water after diseases treatments and should be changed at least once a month. The filter wool should be placed at the top of the filter and will be replaced each time you clean the filter. Since beneficial bacteria your aquarium needs mostly live on your filter media, you should not replace, boil or disinfect the sponges, but only clean them with water that you remove from your aquarium itself.
Real plants are often a favorite and can be a hobby in itself. Healthy plants also provide another form of natural filtration as they can consume excess nitrates and toxins in the water…but uncared for plants do more harm than good as rotting plants can contribute to bad water quality which in turn can harm your fish.
Also do research prior to investing in live plants: ensure that your lighting is sufficient for the plants you wish to grow.
After having positioned all the equipment and the decorations, before you buy your fishes you need to cycle your aquarium.
Cycling means growing the correct bacteria needed to consume the toxins (ammonia) your fish put out through waste. In order to do the cycling you can add commercial products (bacteria starters) into your filter or you can let the aquarium run for a few weeks. The first option will accelerate the nitrogen cycle and will not toy with your patience.
Fish like variety just as humans do. There are frozen foods, sinking foods, pellets, wafers, flakes and many others. Regardless of whatever food you choose, overfeeding is very easy to do and can be detrimental to fish health and water quality. Fish always seem hungry but they can be easily overfed which can cause bloating and swim bladder issues. It’s also good practice to fast your fish one day per week so that their digestive tracts can clean themselves out.
Your salt water aquarium
The salt water aquarium is a little more complicated than a fresh water one. It needs more care and more equipment then the latter. The basics are the same as those presented in the fresh water aquarium article, so here we will present some of the specifics of salt water aquarium.
The tank setup, size, shape, depth will all be influenced by the animals that you will be keeping. For example, if you want to keep corals, you may need to get a shallow tank so that you can get maximum light intensity to the corals you’re interested in keeping.
In the ocean you will not have constant unidirectional flow of water, as is the case with power heads. We can reproduce these conditions on a much smaller scale by using either a wave maker or by using multiple power heads placed strategically around the tank to generate these turbulent water flows that corals do well in. Don’t direct the output of a power head directly on a coral. It could damage the coral’s tissue after a while. It would be better to have a fewer amount of larger power heads than many small ones.
High water flows are important for several reasons. They help keep detritus and uneaten foods suspended for filter feeders, mechanical filters or protein skimmers so they can remove them from the water before they start to break down and effect the water quality. Water flow is also important because it can wash away any slime coatings that corals sometimes form to protect themselves from predators or other corals and the water flows carry food particles to the corals in the currents generated.
Reverse osmosis water will need to be used in modern day marine aquarium. This is basically water which has been put through a special filter to remove pretty much everything!
Tropical marine fish and invertebrates need a constant temperature of 24-26°C.
A good colour light mixture is half blue, half white, this is good for most corals and shows of the fish colours better, and it looks a lot more ocean like.
Cooling… most tanks are fitted with fluorescent lighting so they don’t have a problem with overheating. However, on a hot day, an aquarium can easily overheat, so you may need to cool your tank! The best way to cool a tank is a chiller. Most people just use fans to force evaporation to cool the tank down. It’s wise to keep a few reverse osmosis ice cubes in the freezer in case of any overheating emergency.
The salt mix is very important. The natural ocean water contains more than just salt. It contains lots of other minerals that create proper water chemistry. Salt is measured in relative gravity and should be between 1,022 and 1,025.
It might be a good idea to have a sump. A sump is a separate tank that is usually fed water by gravity using an overflow in the display tank. The water goes over the lip of the overflow, goes into the stand pipe in the overflow and then flows into the sump. A return pump in the sump returns water back to the display tank.
The aquarium sump can provide several nice benefits. It can hide/house ugly equipment. It increases the total amount (volume) of water in your system. It can make water changes easier, since the sump is usually lower to the ground. You can also add saltwater aquarium supplements into the sump instead of in the main display aquarium, which should give the supplements more time to dissolve without possible harming the tank inhabitants.
Filtration is mechanical (filters similar with the fresh water aquarium ones), biological (live rocks and live sand) and chemical (using a protein skimmer).
Live rock is a very porous rock coming from reefs. Inside the live rock’s thousands of holes lives bacteria, along with lots of other micro-organisms. You need at least 1kg of live rock per 10 litres of water to sufficiently filter the aquarium for moderate stocking.
A protein skimmer absorbs molecular compounds from the water. If you can’t fit or afford one, then chemical filtration can be done by other mediums, such as carbon.