Tropical Fish Report

Aquariums are awesome to look at and just watching them can calm you down and make you feel really good. But they can also upset you if you keep finding your beautiful fish floating on top of the water instead of swimming happily below the surface. By learning how to avoid some common mistakes you can keep yourself and your aquarium healthy and happy.

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Don’t Put in Too Many Fish When you get an aquarium it is tempting to fill it with too many fish. Don’t do it! If you resist the urge to buy every fish you want you will save yourself money, time spent cleaning and the lives of the fish you own. It might look like pet stores have their tanks overstocked but remember that they also have twice as many filtration systems as they need and they are constantly taking fish out as they are sold.

You cannot expect to keep your fish alive if you try and pack them into your aquarium. The best rule to follow is to use four gallons of your tank for every fish. This is assuming your fish are one inch in length, excluding the tail fins. Older books say to use one gallon per inch of fish but this has proved to be inaccurate. And you have less than twenty gallons of water in your twenty gallon tank when you add in the plants, decorations and gravel. You should limit the number of fish to five in a twenty gallon tank.

Don't Give Your Fish Too Much Food Scientists may try and tell you that aquarium fish are not smart but you know these fish know how to beg for food and they do it well. But like humans, eating too much food is not good for fish. Fish that are eating too much will also be excreting a lot of waste. This is hard on your filtration system as well as the chemical makeup of the water in the tank. In general you should not feed your fish any more than they can eat in about three minutes.

If the fish are bottom feeders or are skittish, give them ten to fifteen minutes. You will learn this by doing it. You might feel as if you aren’t feeding your fish enough but remember that fish have small stomachs and don’t need as much food as you think they do. Buy the Largest Tank You Can Afford Aquarium buyers think that having a smaller tanks and bowls means less work. This is wrong because smaller tanks get dirty in a shorter amount of time and require daily upkeep. The larger the tank, and with the correct number of fish inside, the less looking after it will need.