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John Tullock, a lifetime aquarist, owned a retail and mail-order aquarium business for years.He founded the American Marinelife Dealer Association. Tullock has authored twelve books about aquariums, including Bring Me Home: Saltwater Aquariums Make a Great Hobby and Saltwater Aquarium Models (both from Howell Book House). He holds a master's degree in zoology.

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Living works of art, freshwater aquariums bring nature inside. They're fascinating, soothing, and mesmerizing, but designing and creating an aquarium can be time-consuming. This book shows you step-by-step and fish-by-fish how to create a beautiful, harmonious aquarium that mimics a natural habitat and fosters healthy fish and plant life. It includes: More than 80 detailed recipes for aquariums of different types and sizes, depicting a variety of natural freshwater environments from five continentsSpecific aquarium model designs in which fish and plants flourish, maintenance is easy, and the aquarium enhances the homeDesign considerations, including space limitations, backgrounds, and aquascaping ideasA 16-page color insert that's an inspiring catalog of fish and plant varietiesThe basics of aquarium setup and maintenance

With these model designs and this information, your fish and plants will coexist beautifully in their freshwater habitat and your aquarium will provide years of captivating, calming enjoyment.

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Freshwater Aquarium Models

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Caring for an aquarium need not be a terrible chore, and anyone can learn how an aquarium works. Even if you consider yourself a rank amateur, you should have a good grasp of the basics by the end of this chapter. I'll cover basic aquarist skills you will need to develop in order to take proper care of your tank.

Water

Water is the most obvious component of any aquarium system. Aquarists of long experience sometimes make much ado about the chemistry of their aquarium water. Its degree of acidity or lack thereof, the concentration of dissolved minerals, the presence of disinfecting agents in municipal supplies, any or all of these can become the stuff of vigorous debate. From a practical standpoint, however, you will need to make do with whatever comes out of your tap unless you are prepared for a major effort. Commercial preparations for altering the two important water parameters, pH and hardness, abound, but using them to bring tap water in line with desired aquarium conditions becomes a never-ending proposition. Finding out the present condition of your tap water and choosing an aquarium habitat accordingly makes more sense. For example, suppose your water is hard and slightly alkaline. It will be great, as is, for the livebearing fishes of Central America such as swordtails and platies (Xiphophorus sp.). On the other hand, discus require soft, acidic water, and may not do as well for you unless you alter the tap water accordingly. Determining your water conditions involves no more than a phone call or a check of your utility company's Web site. Simply search the site or call and ask for information regarding the pH and hardness. With luck, your water will already test within a range that is acceptable to most common tropical fish species, that is, at or just above or below neutral in pH (6.5-7.5) and moderately hard (160-220 ppm).

Your local dealer may do nothing to alter tap water conditions, as this represents an ongoing operating expense. A quick check of the fish that look particularly vibrant in the dealer's tanks may provide clues to choices that will thrive in your local water. If your dealer does make the effort to adjust tap water conditions to meet the demands of certain species, ask for advice on how to do this most cost effectively at home.

The most common and popular tropical fish tolerate a range of water conditions. No doubt, this is one reason for their popularity. Some species, unfortunately, do not adapt so readily to captivity unless their demands for a particular kind of water are met. When this is the case, I include specific recommendations for water conditions. If you choose to create one of these habitats, be prepared to supply sufficient water of the appropriate kind, which may mean altering your tap water.

Altering water to suit tropical fish can be done at home, though the effort requires regular repetition. For example, if you need softer water, you can simply dilute tap water appropriately with distilled water from the grocery store. To reduce the hardness from 200 ppm to 100 ppm, you would mix equal parts of tap water and distilled water. If you have need for more than a few gallons of purified water at a time, you may find it more convenient to install a deionization tank or reverse osmosis unit. Removing something from water is always harder than adding something to it, hence the need to install special equipment to reduce hardness. Lowering the hardness of significant quantities of water imposes a considerable additional expense. For example, a reverse osmosis unit requires regular maintenance and replacement of filter media. Most units waste several gallons of water for each gallon of product. These costs add up.

Increasing the hardness, on the other hand, is easy. Simply add a measured quantity of the appropriate mineral salts. Commercial products abound for this purpose. Many contain common household chemicals, such as baking soda or Epsom salt. The cost per gallon of water treated is small, since these chemicals are cheap. Among aquarium fish, African cichlids in particular benefit from water treated to increase its hardness. No tap water is likely to be as hard and alkaline as these fish prefer. Similarly, fish from estuarine habitats, where seawater mixes with fresh water, do best with added salt. In this case, synthetic seawater mix, sold dry in plastic bags, serves the purpose well. Aquarium stores that stock saltwater fish will have one or more brands on hand. Additions of commercial hardness increasers or seawater mix will typically raise the pH to an alkaline (8.0-8.3) range. Therefore, you seldom need a second additive for pH maintenance.

Lowering the pH can be tricky. Because hard water may be difficult to adjust, beginning with soft water gives the best results. Distilled water or water from a deionization tank or reverse osmosis unit should have a pH close to neutral (7.0). To provide the slightly acidic (6.5) to strongly acidic (5.0) water that some fish insist upon necessitates adding acid. For this purpose, sodium phosphate often appears in a little bottle on the shelves of aquarium shops. Adjusting the pH by adding acid in chemical form is easily overdone, however, because a little of the chemical goes a long way. The added sodium probably does not do plants or fish much good, either, unless they come from an estuarine environment. A more natural method of pH reduction involves passing the water through a small amount of horticultural peat, or introducing commercial additives derived from peat. Organic acids leached from the peat reduce the pH gradually over a period of weeks. The mixture of organic compounds from the peat also confers a buffering effect. (Buffering refers to the ability of the aquarium to remain stable with regard to pH over a long period of time.) With time and regular maintenance, under peat filtration the aquarium water remains stable at the target range of pH 6.0. Some of the most exquisite small species require such soft, peaty water. Pencilfish (characins in the genera Nannobrycon and Nannostomus) provide but one example. I consider the brownish color imparted by the peat, giving the water the appearance of weak tea, a desirable, natural effect. If you insist on diamond-clear water, you may want to avoid species demanding soft, acidic water. You can also try removing the color by passing the water over activated carbon. This may thwart your pH control efforts, however, and will require experimentation with different brands of carbon. Then there is the matter of replacing the carbon regularly. I say stick with the natural look.

The necessity for chlorine removal, usually accomplished by adding a small amount of a product containing sodium thiosulfate, is (gasp!) questionable. The use of dechlorinator in aquarium water strikes me as somewhat like carving pumpkins for Halloween. We do it because of tradition, not because it serves any real purpose. Changing 50 percent of the water in my outdoor pond, for example, using replacement water straight from the garden hose and without any dechlorinator added, has never harmed my goldfish. Admittedly, goldfish durability is the stuff of legend, but many aquarium books would have you thinking fish will be dying left and right from the least whiff of chlorine. Were I betting, my money would...