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crazy Fishkeeper,Fancy guppy breeder, amateur marine fishkeeper

Friday, November 14, 2008

(healthy) Aquariums -- an ecosystem for fish

Now, keeping an aquarium is more than just putting a fish into a body/container of water. It is about understanding the needs of the fish to be kept and meeting them -- just as a human needs to keep warm, have shelter for security, food for life-sustainance and health etc. It isn't that complicated really. Just like understanding that a cat needs water, appropriate cat food, a scratch pole and a cosy corner ( or even a bed ) for it to rest.

A typical house for us is just a shelter, just as the hamster cage is for the hamster. The environment inclusive of plants, air, light etc is what makes it complete ! Straight to the point, an aquarium is ideally a small habitat created for the fish as close it is as possible to the environment they come from. How would you feel then, if placed in a glass box with no bed, no furniture, water and food being occasionally dropped for you, leaving you to eat/ sleep in the same place as u "do your business" ??!

"Appropriate" is the key word to keeping any pet happy, healthy and long-lived rather than just keeping it alive: -

Specifically for fishes :

Water == It means much MORE to the fish than fresh air and a clean environment is to us. It is essentially what they live in, eat in, sleep in (not forgetting excreting in! ). Heavily chlorinated water or even dirty water equals to us being enclosed in a smoke chamber and forcing us to drink sewage water. We have a chance of escape, and a choice of spitting out whatever tastes bad, but fishes are trapped in whatever water conditions we put them in, unable to escape. They cant talk or complain, much less cry for help ! So basic conditions would be clean water of a bearable temperature and some water movement to aid gas exchange to replace the oxygen that they use up in that fixed volume of water.

More about water quality in another post.

Space == Fish in general swim more than we walk/ run around, so wouldn't it be fair to provide them a significant amount of water space to swim around and explore. Don't we enjoy that stroll in the garden, the park or by the beach ? It isn't that different... We all are living things and don't enjoy being confined. Remember how detention class felt ? hee...

Food == Feeding worms to dogs, fish to hamsters and carrots to cats seems common sense enough : - they MIGHt eat the above-mentioned to stay alive if thats the only thing they ever get. But we all know it would not do them much good or even create health problems, much less them enjoying it. A more crude way would be humans being given dog/cat/ fish feed...not hard to imagine now ?

All these are just the very basic rules i follow to have a healthy aquarium, not one that just provides the fish some water to turn round and round in and barely staying alive.... Enough of the boring stuff...let's start peeking into some of the fish tanks i started out with ?


first up-- MINI PREDATORS (my little slice of nature...how close can you get seeing a predator fish ambush a smaller fish ? )

Trying to cramp up as many as i can in a limited space...




















My 1st snakehead...baby haruan caught behind Science Centre!











Tilapia species caught behind Sengkang home @Sungei Serangoon




















Hooked onto snakeheads-- chinese/oriental snakehead

















....rainbow snakehead ( channa gachua )











more to come ...

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