My aquarium
Despite my busy hours at office, I still manage to get busy with things that relaxing my mind at home. So, here is my latest hobby. Keeping an aquarium. I got this aquarium as my birthday present last year, and it just only recently that I got this set up. Hehehe…
Well, my first impression of keeping an aquarium is fill in the water, put some deco in, put in fishes, and feed them with food daily, which soon I realize that my idea of keeping an aquarium is teribly wrong.
So, it was the first day that I got the aquarium set up, put the water in, put anti-chlorine luquid, and went to get 10 guppies. The first day, my fish seems so happy swimming around.
2 days later, I realise my fished are behaving oddly. They just swim at the surface of the water, and refuse to swim deeper to the bottom of the aquarium.
The forth day, my fishes behave even weird. They refure to eat, and they look stress. And suddenly, the food started to pollute the water. So I called an SOS, took out the fish and transfer them to a smaller jar while I’m going to clean the aquarium. 4 of my guppies died after that.
I then started to wonder, what went wrong. My fishes don’t seem so happy, the water got poluted easily. So I google around to see on the topic of keeping fresh water aquarium, where I suddenly enlighted to see that there is a science involved behind aquarium. Hohohoho. This kind of this is really my cup of tea.
First pointer that I get is, the aquarium needs a very good filteration. And I came across jargons like mechanical filteration, chemical filteration and biological filteration.
It turned out that this internal filter that is supplied with the aquarium tank isn’t sufficient to give a good mechanical filteration, that is filtering any debris of the excess fish food or fish waste from the water.
So I went to get the following external power filter. The good thing about this one is that, it also comes with activated carbon, used for chemical filteration to filter any dissolved waste from water.
And lastly life is about balance. Even the small thing as my guppies need a balance environment for them to live. From my reading also I come across this thing called “Nitrogen Cycle” where suddenly I remember I learned this during at secondary school during my chemistry class.
Fish waste will break down into ammonia, which is highly toxic to most fishes. With this ammonia contained in the water, soon will develop a good bacteria that will oxidize ammonia in the water into nitrite. But nitrite is also a toxin. Next, another species of bacteria will develop, that will convert nitrite into nitrate, which is not as harmful as nitrite to fishes. But this whole process can take from 2 week to 2 months to complete. But thanks to technology, this whole process can be speed up by using certain product that you can buy.
So, I ended up having the whole range of fish care products. Hehehehe..
Now my guppies strong and healthy.
