Gravel in the tanks

Question
Hi Karen.
I have what may be a silly question for you.
 I have four tanks(1 six gallon three five gallon)that I house male bettas in.  I have gravel at the bottom of each tank for decoration.  
I do weekly water changes(25% of the water) and have a siphon to remove debris.  I stir the gravel well and remove as much debis as possible.  
My question is this.  Do I need to remove the gravel every so often and rinse it well or is what I'm doing sufficient?  Do I even need the gravel at all?  I just think that the tanks look better with the gravel.
Thanks for your time and help.
Sincerly,
DwightAnderson

Answer
Hi Dwight! Thank you for your question!!
Actually, as long as your aquariums have been established there is no need to rinse the gravel, just vacumming it with the aquarium siphon works just great. Rinsing it would destroy beneficial bacteria colonies living on it.
Rinsing is especially uneccesary if all your tanks have a decent filter of some sort. Bowls with no filtration should have their gravel washed along with a 100% water change since bowls get rather dirty and for a fish to be healthy and9 thrive, their bowls must be as clean and pure as possible. Aquariums of 2 or more gallons don't have this problem as long as a filter is present and doesn't have a high bio-load of fish and simply require once or twice a week vacumming and siphoning of the gravel.

Aquariums don't always need gravel, if they have a good filter the system generally will be fine without substrate. Some aquariums, such as discus aquariums and breeder tanks, are often kept bare because of the ease of maintenance-- Discus require very large daily water changes to be healthy. Anyway, gravel DOES hide a lot of debris but this should only be a real problem if you don't vacumm frequently enough and throughly.
Gravel is natural to fish, and a bare tank can be kind of ugly... So my simple answer to all this is, gravel is good and it's not at the same time--- the bad part is it hides lots of debris and sometimes makes keeping some aquariums clean very hard. But the good thing is, gravel provides an excellent home for beneficial bacteria to thrive, plus it looks very attractive and it further makes an aquarium more natural to fish... So use gravel, but keep it clean!!!! ;-)

I hope this helps!

I wish you the best! What you are doing as a maintenance routine is excellent!---it's great you are taking such great care of your bettas water quality!

Happy fishkeeping Dwight!
Karen~