The aquarium is a transparent container for the constant keeping of fish. The water in the aquarium plays a huge role for the organisms and plants living in it. Try to monitor the purity of the water and adhere to the recommendations.
It is necessary
Aquarium, water and attached instructions
Instructions
Step 1
Before planting plants and fish in a new aquarium, you should prepare not only the water, but the aquarium itself. The frame aquarium is thoroughly washed with warm water at room temperature with baking soda or laundry soap. Then it is filled with water at room temperature, depending on the putty, for a period of two to three to ten days. After two or three days, the procedure should be repeated. The water needs to be changed two or three times until the smell of paint disappears.
Step 2
All-glass aquariums made of organic glass are washed with warm water with the addition of salt or a 5% solution of acetic or hydrochloric acid. After that, they are washed again with warm water.
When filling a new aquarium, it should be remembered that it is first filled with water up to half, and after two or three days, water is added so that 4-8 cm remains to the top edge. Thus, the pressure on the glass of the aquarium increases gradually, and they do not break.
When filling a small aquarium with water, a wide plate, a hand, a piece of plywood, a sheet of cardboard should be placed under the stream so as not to wash out the soil.
Step 3
A large aquarium is best filled with a hose. In this case, the water should fall on a deep plate, placed on another plate, standing upside down on the ground.
Occasionally, aquarists fill the aquarium with water immediately after planting, rather than before. In this case, when filling the aquarium with water, you will have to use a funnel with a reflective plate.
You need to find a cover for your aquarium (usually thick glass). It will protect it from dust, will not allow the fish to jump out, will prevent too rapid cooling and evaporation of water. If the indoor air is too dry, the aquarium can be used to humidify it. In this case, you do not need to cover the aquarium, but you need to lower the water level so that the fish cannot jump out of it.
For air flow into the aquarium and to protect the iron frame from rusting, the coating is not placed on the walls of the aquarium, but on small stands 5-15mm high. These can be pieces of eraser, organic glass strips, non-oxidizing metal clips. But the aquarium, which contains fish that can jump well or crawl along the walls through the gap, should be tightly covered.
Step 4
How to make your aquarium beautiful.
The design of the inside of the aquarium should be close to the natural habitat of fish, since we usually create an aquarium in order to have a corner of nature in the apartment. Sometimes you can see blocks of marble or divers imitating a flooded city, from whose helmets air bubbles beat, but all this can only be allowed for a child in a children's room.
An aquarium not for children should look as simple as possible on the outside and bright, but naturally on the inside. It is advisable to hide all devices and technical devices. In general, when choosing decorations for an aquarium, one should strive, first of all, to recreate a natural picture, emphasizing only the beauty of the main inhabitants of the aquarium - fish and plants.
Step 5
The ground looks good, located with steps, and sand spreading in the water can be fixed with stones or strips of glass hidden behind them.
Flower trays along the back wall create a nice backdrop. They can be arranged in steps: plant low plants in front, and tall ones behind them.
Another variant of multi-tiered planting is also possible: low plants are planted in front, and large ones at the back and sides. For lovers of asymmetry, you can suggest planting a large plant in front, almost at the front glass, and put a stone or snag in the middle or on the side, while letting plants of different sizes grow throughout the aquarium. When choosing, remember that different plants require different lighting. Plants with the same requirements can be grouped at different levels and equipped with terraces (steps), which are usually made of wood and stones. There should be one or more eye-catching bright spots in the overall composition of your aquarium. The rest of the decorative means should not be conspicuous, it is better to place them in the background.
Sometimes the overall picture of an aquarium has only one eye-catching element. It should be a bush of a lush plant, such as Japanese Sagittarius or Cryptocoryne. It needs to be planted a little to the side of the center of the aquarium, so as not to create unpleasant symmetry for the eyes, and also to make room for feeding. Then, along the edges, plants with ribbon-like leaves, common vallisneria or branching elodea and pinnate, which, expanding, will create frames in the background, will look good. With a few bushes that do not clutter up the middle of the aquarium and the foreground, you can arrange isoethis, spiral-leaved vallisneria, marsilia; the soil should be sloping everywhere with the deepest place in the free, unplanned part of the aquarium, where dirt will collect. On the surface of the water, it is good to put Riccia, Salvinia and a few kale or frog bushes.
Step 6
If you have two or three aquariums next to you, when planting plants, you need to think not only about creating an underwater landscape in each of them, but also about the overall impression of the living area as a whole.
The underwater picture achieves the greatest charm, of course, only when the plants begin to grow: leaves oriented in relation to the light, shoots that occupy the most brightly lit places, give the aquarium landscape a greater naturalness.
Step 7
To recreate the river landscape, rounded stones are used, to imitate rocks - flat stones of irregular shape, fragments without sharp edges. In aquariums with digging fish, large stones that serve as the basis for high terraces are placed directly on the bottom, sometimes they are glued with epoxy or cement.
Rocks intended for the aquarium must be free of metals and calcium salts. It is best to use stones of basalt origin, as well as granite and some types of sandstone. If the chemical composition of the stone is suspicious, it can be treated with a solution of hydrochloric acid, like gravel.
The roots and branches of trees look beautiful in the aquarium. For decoration, you can use driftwood that has been lying in running water or peat bogs for a long time. The best species are alder and willow. A rotten tree that has lain under a layer of silt for some time should not be placed in the aquarium. Live wood is completely unusable. Roots or branches, even if they have been in running water for a long time, should be boiled in a saturated solution of sodium chloride before placing in the aquarium. Such treatment disinfects wood and compacts its structure - boiled driftwood becomes dense, heavy and sinks in water.
For a tropical aquarium, you can use coconut shells, bamboo and reed stalks.
Step 8
In aquariums for crepuscular, nocturnal, or territorial fish species, shelter should be provided for each such fish. For this, driftwood is placed on the ground (again, alder or willow); separate or folded in the form of caves, grottoes, large stones; disguised with sand, gravel, stones or driftwood trimming ceramic pipes or pots.
Step 9
For the spawning period in the aquarium, it is imperative to create shelters or a substrate for eggs. These can be flower pots lying on their sides, coconut shells, ceramic products, cuttings of glass, synthetic pipes, fibers, tiles, etc. However, these items should not have sharp corners and release harmful substances into the water.
A piece of glass should be hung in the cage for marking fry by female viviparous fish species. It should hang obliquely on an aluminum or galvanized steel wire so that its lateral edges adjoin the walls of the aquarium, and the lower one has a gap of 3-4 mm through which the fry would be able to fall down.
You can not often and even more so completely change the water in the aquarium. For most species of tropical fish, it is enough to simply renew the water, and this is done no more than once every seven to ten days.
To do this, debris and food residues are sucked from the bottom of the aquarium with a rubber hose, no more than 1/3, and preferably 1/5 of the total volume of water is drained, adding water with the same characteristics as the water in the aquarium. Fresh water should be added in small portions, gradually.
In cold water aquariums, the water should not be heated when refilling. For warm water aquariums, it is best to use water 1–2 degrees warmer than the aquarium water.
A partial change of water is carried out when the oxygen regime is violated (if the fish are suffocating), when cleaning the bottom and glass. But you should try to keep even partial water changes to a minimum. When changing water or cleaning the aquarium, fish do not need to be caught.
A complete change of water is an extreme measure and should be carried out in exceptional cases: in case of disease and death of fish, the appearance of parasitic microorganisms, etc. After a complete change of water, the biological balance must be re-established. And with a well-established stable regime, the water may not change for years.
