Steps To Protect Your Fish From Aquarium Diseases

Maintaining your aquarium can be a daunting task and difficult too if you don’t know that much about keeping fish. Fish can often die in your aquarium even though you had been taking proper care as directed by your aquarium specialist. This may be due to poor conditions in the tank or due to the introduction of disease from outside the tank. An outbreak of any disease in the aquarium can be very disastrous for your fish, weakening and possibly killing an entire community of fish. The only possible solution to prevent disease in your aquarium is to follow these simple steps to protect your fish.

Build up a colony of bacteria in your new aquarium before adding fish to it.

A new tank environment can be very hazardous for your fish. This may sound strange but it’s true. Every new aquarium needs to build up a colony of bacteria that can break down the waste products your fish will expel. Prepare your aquarium to have the right bacteria functioning so that the ammonia and nitrate levels created by the waste products can be controlled in the tank. The bacteria thus provide the aquarium with a biological filtration system that cannot be covered by your mechanical filtration systems. This process of building up a bacterial colony is called the �cycling process�. It takes not less than 15 days to create a bacterial colony in your tank.

Do not add too many fish in the same tank.

If you are following the standard rule for aquarium health, that is to keep no more than 1" (2.5cm) of fish per gallon (3.8L) of water in the tank, then you are going the right way. More fish would mean more waste for your filtration system to try to keep up with, plus the fish become stressed when the water is more polluted and more crowded.

Quarantine all new fish before adding them to the other fish in the tank.

Make sure not to add new fish directly to your tank until you’ve had them at home, adjusting to your water conditions in a separate quarantine tank for about a month. This will buy you time to monitor the fish and spot any signs of disease that the fish may have brought along from the pet store. This will prevent your fish in the tank from being exposed to any disease that the new fish is carrying. If the new fish is sick, you can treat it in the quarantine tank and then add it to the other fish in the aquarium.

Make sure you don’t overfeed your fish.

Overfeeding your fish can result in polluting the tank water, ultimately causing diseases to build up in the tank. Make a rule to feed your fish on a schedule. Feed your fish as much as they will consume in five minutes. Some species need to be fed once a day, others as often as three times a day. Try to keep the feeding time consistent.

Change the aquarium water regularly.

Make it a habit to remove up to one quarter of the aquarium water every week and replace it with fresh conditioned water. Remember that the aquarium has no way to revitalize its water itself the way a river or an ocean does. This is necessary to keep you fish healthy and disease free.