What is “Cycling”?
A “cycled aquarium” is a tank that has established bacterial colonies to process fish waste, in the form of ammonia, into nitrates. It is very important for aquariums with fish to be cycled, as ammonia is toxic to fish. Adding fish to un-cycled aquaiums will generally result in most or all of the fish dying.
What cycling is NOT
Despite the bad advice of so many pet store employees, cycling does NOT mean adding water to the aquariums and letting it sit and filter for a few days. Doing that can be useful to make sure your equipment doesn’t die right away, but does nothing to cycle the tank.
How to Cycle a Tank
There are three methods for cycling:
- Fishless cycling
- Fish-in cycling
- Seeding a tank
EVERYONE who ever keeps fish has used one of those methods. Those that are not aware of the choice have chosen fish-in cycling by default. Read more…
Here are some pearls of wisdom I wish I had when I was starting out with my aquarium.
Starting Out and Buying Aquarium Stuff
Accept that you are probably going to kill some fish on accident. You will either learn from the mistake or drop the hobby.
New Aquariums need to be cycled.
Small tanks are not easier to maintain than large ones. The large volume of water generally provides a more stable environment for fish, and is more forgiving of mistakes by beginners.
Under-gravel filters suck. You will hate them. Also see the comment on gravel.
Unless you have a specific need, don’t put gravel in the bottom of your tank. If it is not kept clean, it will contaminate the water, causing sick and dying fish.
Do not buy fish on impulse
Don’t rely on the tank size rating when buying a filter for your tank. Most filters are rated on their flow without media, which will slow down the flow. You want filtration that will turn the water over between 5 and 10 times per hour. For a 10 gallon tank, that’s a 50 to 100 gph filter. For a 55G tank, it’s 225 to 550 gph.
Canister filters are well worth the extra money
Maintaining a planted tank is much harder and more expensive than it looks
Spend the extra money and get a “master test kit” to test your water with (this is the kind that uses drops of reagent chemicals in test tubes). The strips are not that reliable.
Online pet stores are MUCH cheaper for most food, chemicals and hardware.
Pet stores regularly sell fish that are entirely inappropriate for 99.9% of fish keepers. Know what you are buying and whether you can properly care for them.
The employees of pet stores only appear to know what they are talking about.
Don’t accept the advice of pet store employees on setting up a new tank
Don’t accept the advice of pet store employees on how to treat a disease with your fish
- Pet store employees have a medicine to sell you to cure just about anything you can come up with. The trouble is, medicine can rarely cure the cause of a problem. Read more…
People new to the fish keeping hobby are often not fully informed about what equipment they will need. Unfortunately, that often leads to being turned off to the hobby, as it can be considerably more expensive than than originally planned.
In this post, I’ll describe the most commonly required equipment and supplies for a standard freshwater aquarium. This is a good list for keeping the most common types of community freshwater fish. If you are keeping some species of fish, such as African cichlids, or you have extreme water conditions, such as very hard well water, you may require some additional equipment.
Basic Equipment Required for Starting an Aquarium Read more…
Large goldfish that barely fits into the small bowl
So, can a goldfish survive in a bowl?
The short answer is yes – for a while. Many people equate the fact that a goldfish can live for some period of time in a bowl with their ability to live in a bowl in general. The most common “comet” goldfish are generally cheap (under $0.25US) and sold while very small – usually less than 1 inch long and pet stores often have bowls in the vicinity of the gold fish. All of this makes it reasonable to believe that they can be kept in a bowl.
No, they can’t.
There are two major problems with keeping goldfish in a bowl
Read more…
