Fishkeeping: Day 7

Now that I am back in the real world, its time to fill you in on the hobby. As most of you know, I was not in town last weekend, and therefore could not work on my aquarium, so I took that time to read and research. I am reaching the end of the "Aquariums for Dummies" book and I'm now getting ready to start the book on tropical fish.

The book did a really good job of explaining the concepts of fishkeeping, and demystifying a lot of things like cleaning your tank, feeding, spawning, aquarium equipment, and aquarium ecology. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to fishkeeping, and so far even without any fish in the tank its is much more complicated than social network gaming, but its actually pretty easy to swallow fishkeeping once you do some research. Unlike social network gaming, you can't just jump into fishkeeping. Everything must be planned and deliberate, not just for your sake, but for the sake of the little fish you are caring for.

The biggest hurdle to cross is getting the tank setup and the nitrogen cycle started. Basically, in addition to the mechanical filter that you have in your tank, a biological filter is formed where bacteria feed off the waste of your fish and turn it into less harmful chemicals. The bacteria break down ammonia into nitrites, and then the nitrites into nitrates. To give you an idea of how important the bacteria is, the normal range of ammonia is 0.0 - 0.25 mg/l whereas nitrate normal range is 0.0 - 40 mg/l, that means that nitrate is roughly 160 times less harmful than ammonia to fish. The biological filter starts growing the second you put water in the tank, but you can speed up the process by adding a hardy fish like the Danio.

So that's what I'm going to do. Tonight, I'm going to have Tony and Stephanie bring over 2 of my Danio's and put them in the tank to start building up the biological filter and in turn the nitrogen cycle.

I have some really good idea for names. I'll let you know after they have moved in.