Adding Fish To Your Aquarium
How many fish can my aquarium hold?
When you're determining how many fish your aquarium can hold, there are some wives' tales that have some practical common sense that you can use. One of the old wives' tales out there is “an inch of fish per gallon of water”. Unfortunately, that doesn't work because how much you feed a fish and how often you change part of your water totally factors into how many fish you can have, because it affects the water chemistry. If you don't have great water chemistry, you can't keep one fish, let alone more than one. You can use that as a guideline - the whole one inch per thing. However, it's better to just look at the type of fish that you want. Ask an expert what he recommends and then you can get a better idea of how many fish you typically can put into a tank. You can put anywhere from one fish in a 20 gallon to 20 fish, depending on the type of fish, the size and a few other things that go into it.
How many fish should I add to a new aquarium?
When you're adding fish to a brand new aquarium, you can't add too many. You might have a tank that ultimately can hold 50 fish, but when you are starting off that tank and getting it cycled and ready to go, you have to slowly build your way up to that total number. You may start with three fish, or six fish, or ten fish. It's really going to depend on the type of system you have, salt or fresh, and how many gallons it is and how big the tank is. That's going to determine how many fish you can start with, and ultimately how many fish you can build up to.
How do I introduce new fish to my aquarium?
Once you've purchased your fish from the store and we've bagged it up and you've taken it to your aquarium, you have to acclimate the fish specifically for temperature. It may be cold where you're from. It may be really hot. Sometimes, when people get fish they ask us about quarantining, or they ask if quarantining a fish, or segregating it before bringing it into the fish tank is a good idea. It is one of the best ideas you could ever apply to your aquarium. The reason is that you don't know when you bought the fish from the aquarium store or how long they've had that fish. Just like people with disease, sometimes there are no symptoms. You just don't know. You would hate to have your tank really well established, and you buy the last specimen, and that specimen goes in your tank, and nobody knew it was sick because it didn't have any symptoms. It then gets all of your other fish sick, and they die. Therefore it's better, if you can afford it, to set up a quarantine aquarium, and to quarantine everything that is going to go into your tank. There are ways of going about doing that. Whether you're going to put some kind of antibacterial in the water, or if you're just going to sit it in there for a prescribed period of time and watch it, and make sure it doesn't break down with any symptoms before you put it in your tank. You should do it to protect the health of your aquarium, and if you can afford to have a second quarantine tank, it's one of the best things you could ever do.
How do I control territorial aggression in my aquarium?
Fish are very territorial. They're wild animals for the most part and they are analogous to a lion. People realize when they're watching the Discovery Channel that lions are always very territorial and they'll kill anything that comes into their territory. Fish are exactly the same way and it's really hard to look at your little guppy and go wow! He's really going to defend his turf? “He absolutely is.” You can't control that instinct in a fish, but what you can do is when you're picking your fish; you can pick fish that are less dominating of their territory than others and you create a natural pecking order. And it's really important, and that's why I tell people to do is: “create a fish wish-list of every fish you could possibly want and then have a professional Aquarist help you rank those fish to most aggressive and most territorial all the way down to least. And you are going to want to put the most aggressive in last and the least aggressive and territorial in first and work your way up.”