How big a fish tank should you buy? Or, if you already have a tank, what does the size of the tank mean about what you can put in it?

Generally speaking extreme tank sizes (very large or very small) are hard to take care of. This is because there are two different things that make tanks difficult and they follow opposite trends.

Larger tanks are harder to take care of because maintenance takes longer. There’s more water to change, there’s more glass to clean, and there’s more of the tank bottom to siphon bits of food and feces off of. When I have to do a 50% water change on the 110 gallon tank at work I do it all through an automatic water change system attached to the faucet. Even given this it still takes enough time that I generally make sure no one is using that classroom for at least a whole hour.

However, smaller tanks are more difficult because when things go wrong they go wrong faster. Think about some of the things that could go wrong in a tank. Something could leach an acid or base (a new decoration, or new substrate) and change the tank pH. You’d need less acid or base to change the pH of a small tank. Rotting organic matter (extra food, a dead fish) could release ammonia. Again, you’d need less ammonia to bring the ammonia concentration into dangerous ranges in a small tank. Your heater could break (or the power could go out) and the temperature in the tank could drop. Again, a smaller tank will cool down faster (much faster, because of surface area to volume scaling). Generally speaking, more water equals more stability.

These two trends seem to cross somewhere around the 50-gallon range for freshwater. 50 gallons is enough water to be pretty stable, and so larger than 50 gallons is mostly just more work. (Of course, tank size also depends on what you want to keep in it. 50 gallons will be too small for some fish.) Note that saltwater organisms need much more stable conditions than freshwater ones and so saltwater tanks may continue to gain real stability benefits at larger sizes.

But I don’t have space, I need a small tank

This happens. I have a lot of tank space but I still want to stick an extra tank on my desk, and there’s not a lot of space there. Things to consider:

1. You’ll need to keep a sharper eye on a small tank because things will, as I said above, go wrong much faster. This is also true because it’s pretty easy to “under load” a bigger tank, but small tanks are normally running at capacity. This means there’s no margin for error.
2. Despite what lots and lots of pet stores will tell you five gallons is pretty much the minimum for a fish. Betta fish seem to be the most common targets for abuse in this regard. I consistently see 1 gallon or 1.5 gallon tanks sold for bettas, but bettas are really too large for these tanks, and it shows when you see the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy betta. There are some caveats in the five gallon limit, and there are some oddball fish that may be hard to find that can deal with very small pools of water in the wild. However, your standard pet store fish will do better in a five gallon and even some of the smaller schooling fish will really need a ten gallon¹.
3. Not everything you can put in a fish tank is a fish. I have a small tank that is just live plants and dwarf cherry shrimp. They are small, they produce very little waste, and they eat the dead plant material and the algae that grows in the tank which makes the tank practically maintenance-free. Ornamental invertebrates are often easier to keep in small tanks than fish.

What about fish bowls?

Fish bowls are basically just death-traps. For starters, how do you filter one? There are ways around this but fish bowls are a horrible design that are generally too small, waste a lot of their footprint (a straight-sided tank would hold more water for the same footprint), and are a bad shape for attaching the necessary equipment to.

I know what fish I want. How large a tank?

There are no hard and fast rules without knowing the exact species of fish, but there are two general rules to keep in mind.

First, for individual fish, a tank should be four times longer than the fish, twice as wide as the fish, and twice as deep. Active fish will need more room (one reason very small tanks aren’t suitable for most fish – many small fish are active enough that they need more distance) and very, very sedentary fish can make do with less. A handful of fish species (banjo catfish, for instance) spend most of their lives immobile and don’t need this much room. Certain fish may also care more or less about particular tank dimensions. Bottom dwelling fish may not really need twice their body length in tank height because they may never swim much above the bottom. Angelfish, which are “tall” fish, definitely need that height.

Second, there’s a general inch-per-gallon rule. A twenty gallon tank can hold about twenty inches of fish. Some fish have strange body shapes and so this doesn’t work (twenty inches of twig catfish is less total fish than twenty inches of cichlids) but it’s a general rule. The scaling ratios between linear dimensions and cubic volumes also means that this rule can’t possibly be applicable across the full size range of fish people buy for fish tanks and so the rule probably only works for “medium” fish. However, if you’re about to drop fish totaling forty inches into a twenty gallon tank you’re probably headed for disaster.

It’s important to choose whether you are going to go with freshwater or saltwater before you cycle your filtration, so it’s a decision that needs to be made early. It’s also important to choose because you can’t mix freshwater and saltwater fish in one tank.

Why Can’t We Just Mix Fish?

Everyone, and I mean everyone, seems to want “a Nemo”. I’ve been asked about a tank for “a Nemo” (a clownfish) half a dozen times in the last year. Problem is, clownfish are saltwater fish. You can’t just throw them in with your goldfish (for multiple reasons) and expect anything good to come of it.

The reason you can’t mix saltwater and freshwater fish has to do with osmosis. Osmosis is related to diffusion, where molecules move from high concentration to low concentration. If you drop food coloring in a glass of water the food coloring spreads out. This is diffusion. If you blocked the food coloring from moving with some sort of membrane that allowed water to move through it the water would move instead. That would be osmosis. Instead of the food coloring spreading out into the water the water would come to the food coloring.

Now imagine a fish. At a cellular level all a fish is is a bunch of bags of slightly salty water. It’s not all salts, but there’s stuff dissolved in the fish. There’s less stuff dissolved in freshwater and more stuff dissolved in saltwater. So when a fish is placed in freshwater there’s more stuff dissolved in the fish than the surrounding water and water tries to move into the fish. A fish in saltwater faces the opposite problem. Somewhat bizarrely it actually loses water to the surrounding ocean.

Most of this water loss or gain takes place in a fish’s gills. Gills are, at their most basic, thin blood vessels that are surrounded by water. Under the gill cover of a bony fish (the operculum) the gills look like red feathers, each filament of the “feather” being a blood vessel. This works wonderfully for fish because fish blood is normally lower in oxygen than the water (since the fish used oxygen in its cells), higher in carbon dioxide (since the cells produced CO₂ in the same process that used oxygen), and higher in ammonia (which we discussed last article). This means that, without the fish doing anything but pumping blood through the gills, oxygen enters the fish’s blood and CO₂ and ammonia leave. However, there’s no way to allow these things to diffuse across the blood vessel and not let water through, and so the fish also deals with the loss and gain of some things it would rather not have moving in and out of its body.

However, fish are well-adapted to live in the water. Freshwater fish are adapted to deal with a constant influx of water by having ways to constantly push it back out. Saltwater fish do the opposite. A few fish are euryhaline, meaning they can deal with a wide range of salinities, and these fish can generally change their physiological strategy based on the water they find themselves in. (I still wouldn’t recommend moving a euryhaline fish directly from freshwater to saltwater. It might require hours, days, or even months to switch over.) (A few fish deal with this issue in an entirely different way, where they match the salinity of the water around them, but these aren’t fish you tend to keep in aquaria.)

Now imagine taking a freshwater fish, like an oscar, and dumping it into saltwater. The oscar is pumping water out of its body because it normally has water flowing in. Now water is flowing out, and the oscar is just making it worse. In short order the oscar will be dead. If we move our clownfish into the oscar tank the opposite thing will happen with identical results. The clownfish will pull water in even though water is now rushing into its cells. Its cells will begin to lyse (explode) and it will die.

So don’t mix freshwater and saltwater fish.

Ok, So How Do I Decide?

If you have your heart set on a particular species then you need to go with that water type. But if you’re flexible on exact fish here are a few basic rules.

Saltwater gives you a greater variety of non-fish things to put into a tank. Saltwater gives you the opportunity to go for a reef tank, which is full of corals, crabs, shrimp, tube worms, clams, and perhaps echinoderms like starfish or sea urchins (although be aware that starfish often die rapidly in tanks – at least rapidly for starfish). For some people this is a big draw, and reef fish are very pretty fish. I run a small saltwater tank that is nothing but some easy corals, snails, and crabs. I like it a lot, and the small animals make up for some of the big disadvantages of saltwater tanks. The flip side of this is that some of the odder animals sold for saltwater tanks are so poorly understood that it’s almost impossible to even get accurate advice for keeping them alive.

Saltwater is much more expensive. Not every item and every fish is going to be more expensive, but I have paid between $1-$14 per fish for freshwater fish and between $6-$25 for saltwater fish. I’ve never seen a freshwater fish that I wanted that I thought was too expensive (which is to say I’ve seen expensive fish, they just aren’t frequently seen or interesting to me). I’ve skipped on buying dozens of saltwater fish because of price. Now, maybe I’m just cheap, but this is something to consider. This price difference is due to some of what follows.

Saltwater fish are much harder to keep. One really obvious difference between the ocean and freshwater is size. Oceans make up about 66% of the planet’s surface and freshwater makes up about 0.02%. Saltwater fish live in enormous bodies of water while freshwater fish normally don’t. A lot of the freshwater fish popular in tropical fishkeeping come from small creeks or pools (although, contrary to often-repeated opinion, wild betta fish do not actually live in puddles [although some killifish have been reported breeding in puddles]).

Imagine a small creek running through a tropical area in which there is a distinct wet season and a dry season. In the dry season the water becomes hot, more polluted with fish waste (because there’s less water per fish), and because the water isn’t being replaced it ends up with more of whatever it picks up from the creek bed (which may make it more acidic if the bottom is mostly dead plants, or harder if the bottom is certain sorts of stone). When the rains come the water volume may triple in a day. The new water is colder, cleaner, neutral to slightly acidic in pH, and has nothing dissolved in it. If the fish can’t survive these huge changes in the water they live in they’ll die out as a species. Now imagine the ocean. It doesn’t rain for six months. Nothing changes. It rains for a month straight. Fish right at the surface notice the influx of cold, fresh water, but fish ten or twenty feet down probably don’t even know anything is happening. And so, as a direct result of their environments, freshwater fish tend to be much more tolerant of temperature change, pH changes, water hardness change, and those nitrogenous wastes I talked about in the filtration article. Saltwater fish, on the other hand, are much more likely to die when anything changes. This not only makes the fish more expensive, it also means you need a lot more equipment to keep saltwater fish alive.

You should think about a bigger tank for saltwater. Actually, bigger tanks are easier in many ways (which I’ll discuss in another article), but since saltwater fish come from such large environments the advantages of a larger tank are all magnified for them.

You are also much less likely to be able to breed saltwater fish at home. Maybe you don’t care about this, but if you ever want to try to breed fish freshwater fish are much easier. With guppies the challenge is to prevent them from breeding. A few saltwater fish (like some cardinalfish) have been successfully bred in the aquarium, but most can’t be. (This also means that if you’d like to avoid buying fish that have been caught in the wild, perhaps in ways that aren’t very good for the environment, you have more choices in freshwater.) The reason for this is that the ocean has a very different current system than freshwater. Freshwater basically all flows to the ocean. The ocean, however, has loop currents. A number of oceanic species lay eggs that float on these giant currents, hatch out into larvae that look very different from their parents (and live a drifting life far above the bottom), and eventually circle back home (or another suitable area) where they become “normal looking” and start acting more like the adults. Freshwater fish tend not to do this, since having your eggs blown constantly downstream isn’t such a good idea. This means that plenty of freshwater fish will lay their eggs on the ground or on plants and a fish keeper can take care of them, whereas many saltwater fish lay eggs that just go straight into the filter with all the other floating debris.

My quick advice would be not to go for saltwater unless you really, really want a particular fish (or are rich and retired). Saltwater tanks are more expensive and much more work.

The reason I am writing this series of articles is because it turns out that one of the things I get asked about most is keeping fish. Sure, I could talk about what biogeography tells us about the evolution of Siluriformes, but people seem to want to know why their guppies are dying. So here’s a series of articles on setting up and maintaining a fish tank and the science behind it. If you want a quick, simple, here’s-how-to-own-some-fish guide this isn’t for you. This is a science blog, so I’m going to tell you not just what to do but why. That way if you can’t use my favored approach you’ll be able to make an appropriate substitute, or at least you’ll know why your guppies are dying (and then hopefully stop buying more and condemning them to death).

This article series is also aimed primarily at people who want relatively unfussy tanks. This is partly a demand issue, where there are far more people who want a low-maintenance tank with some pretty fish in the living room than people who want to breed rare Central American fish in a basement fishroom. This is also partly an issue of knowledge: people running their own complicated set-ups are likely to already know this stuff, and I am also less knowledgeable about complicated set-ups. I have a lot of fish tanks in my teaching and research labs but most of them are deliberately set up so that if I miss a water change during finals week nothing bad happens.

Our first article is about filtration because filtration is how you are most likely to kill your fish. If you are saying, “I don’t have a filtration issue because my water looks clean,” then this is you for sure.

The short take-home, for people who really wanted a different sort of article, is:

1. Filtration is mostly about getting rid of invisible fish waste.
2. Biological filtration is where it’s at.
3. Biological filtration requires you to cycle your tank BEFORE you add fish.
4. Ultimately, filtration can only save your fish for so long, so you’ll need to change the water periodically as well.

Fish are Toxic Waste Machines

Fish are little toxic waste machines. Filtration is generally divided into three different varieties (mechanical, chemical, and biological) but the first and most important thing to understand about filtration is that a perfectly healthy fish in perfectly clean water will, as a direct product of its metabolism, produce toxic waste which needs to be filtered out. Time and time again I see people asking for help on fish-keeping forums who are sure that their fish caught a disease and need medicine when their fish have merely, but largely literally, peed until their water became toxic. And, instead of changing the water to remove this dangerous waste, these people often spend money buying treatments that, at best, treat the wrong problem and at worst kill the very organisms that will help them solve that problem.

The central issue here is that a fish tank is not a closed ecosystem. Fish tanks are not closed ecosystems because, most importantly, you feed the fish. While there are lots of things fish may eat all fish eat products that were once alive (other animals, plants, or single-celled organisms). What is most important here is that all living things contain at least trace amounts of protein. Even plant food, which is generally considered to be protein-poor, has small amounts of plant enzymes in it, and those enzymes are proteins. Moreover, many fish eat relatively protein-rich animal food, and all fish need to eat protein to build their own protein-rich bodies. The problem with this is that protein contains nitrogen, and lots of it. When protein is used to build more protein (i.e., a fish eats a worm and converts some worm-proteins into fish-proteins) that isn’t an issue. However, when protein is used for energy, which is also very common (and impossible to prevent, before you ask if you can feed a special diet that will stop this), the nitrogen in the protein just becomes waste. What it becomes as part of the metabolic process is ammonia (NH₃).

This is where the problem starts. If you’ve ever used ammonia as a cleaning product you are probably familiar with its toxicity (and with the fact that it looks just like water). Even smelling ammonia can make your nose and eyes burn. Ammonia is so toxic that in land vertebrates energy is expended to transform ammonia into something less toxic (either urea or uric acid, depending on what sort of land vertebrate you are¹). Fish² have the luxury of being surrounded by water and so instead of storing urea or uric acid for later excretion they simply dump the ammonia into the water. This actually happens largely through the gills. While fish do urinate like land vertebrates they also have a large area in the gills where blood is a thin membrane away from the surrounding water (if this weren’t true they wouldn’t be able to extract oxygen from the water) and ammonia simply diffuses out of the bloodstream. In the wild this ammonia would be dispersed across gallons and gallons of water. In a fish tank the ammonia can’t go anywhere and so it can rapidly accumulate to dangerous levels.

Fish waste isn’t the only source of ammonia in a fish tank. Dead animals also produce ammonia as they decay, since bacteria causing a body to rot are just eating it, and dead animals are full of protein. These dead animals may be a fish that died while you were gone for the weekend, or a snail that you didn’t realize came in on a plant and which has now died, or the bits of dead animals in the food your fish didn’t eat.

Filtration

Filtration is commonly divided into three categories, and so I’ll go through them under the normal titles.

Mechanical Filtration Mechanical filtration is what people who just got their first fish tank tend to worry about most. Mechanical filtration is about removing the “bits” that make the water look dirty. It normally involves some sort of pad or grating that catches these bits and has to be cleaned off or changed out on a regular basis.  Two important things to note about mechanical filtration are:

1) The fish mostly don’t care. Sure, getting rid of bits that will rot reduces ammonia, and that’s good, but fish live in water that is muddy, full of sticks, or stained with tannins all the time. Some fish do like or maybe even need crystal-clear water but other fish actually prefer water that is hard to see through. I have some fish in my lab that live in water the color of weak coffee. Originally their tank was clear water, but after some reading I discovered that these were fish from blackwater environments where tannins leaching from dead plants turn the water brown or black. I added these chemicals and the fish are much more active now. Mechnical filtration is largely something you do to make your fish tank look nice to you.

2) You should be doing water changes, and when you do this you should be using a siphon. It’s a lot easier to get rid of visible fish feces and old food by siphoning it out than it is to rely on a filter to do this. With a siphon you can also stir up your gravel to get out things that have become trapped between the pieces. (If you have a sand bottom everything will collect on the top.) I have largely abandoned mechanical filtration except for this siphoning in my tanks.

Chemical Filtration

Sometimes you have weird chemicals in your tank. Chemical filtration deals with these. These can come from a variety of sources – something you put in the tank as a decoration, something your water treatment company put into the water, or some off-kilter biological process. The most common chemical filtration you will see is activated carbon (charcoal) filtration. These filters use either loose activated carbon or bags of activated carbon to remove harmful chemicals from the water. This is exactly what most drinking water filters for home use use. A few important notes about chemical filtration:

1. The most worrisome chemical, unless you (or your child) throw random things into the fish tank, is the chlorine or chloramine your water treatment company probably adds to your water. This stuff kills bacteria quite nicely, which is a problem in your tank (biological filtration depends on a colony of beneficial bacteria to work) and also burns fish gills. I have a friend who changed water in their tank and didn’t remove the chlorine first. Within two hours all of her fish had died of suffocation. You can trickle water through activated carbon to remove this but a better strategy is to get a bottle of water conditioner and add some to the water you are about to put in the fish tank. The only time I have ever run chemical filtration on a tank was when I once had a problem with wood staining the water in a tank that was supposed to stay clear. I added some activated carbon to the filter and within a week the problem was solved.
2. All chemical filtration runs out over time and has to be changed. Activated carbon filters eventually stop working and may even begin to shed previously-trapped toxins back into the water. Unlike biological filtration, which tends to improve over time, chemical filtration works best straight out of the box and gets worse over time.

I have an ambivalent relationship with chemical filtration. One thing I see far too much of is tiny plastic tanks sold with a “filter” that isn’t anything more than a way to suck water through a bag of activated carbon. These probably do save some fish from owners who dump water into the tank straight out of the tap without adding a dechlorinator or (shudder) use cleaning products to clean out the tank and leave chemicals behind. They also probably make a killing for the companies that make them, since the carbon bag will be regularly replaced, and my guess is that a lot of fish will also be getting replaced. On the other hand, a bit of activated carbon in a filter can save you from all sorts of chemical weirdness. I always keep some in lab for the day when someone knocks a strange chemical over into a fish tank. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it does I’ll be dumping that carbon in the filter.

Biological Filtration

Biological filtration is your right-hand man, your best weapon, in the fight against ammonia. Far too often it seems that people go to a pet store and say that their fish are doing poorly. The store may ask to test the tank water (most places that sell pet fish will test your water for you, which is good to know) and they determine that the person in question has too much ammonia in their tank. So they sell them something like AmmoLock and the person goes home, treats the tank, and in a few weeks their fish are dead. I’m not saying that short-term ammonia-detoxifiers aren’t any good. However, they are short-term solutions. When you realize that you’ve got 2 ppm of ammonia (which is REALLY bad) something like AmmoLock will save your fish now. But what keeps you from having that 2 ppm next week again? Biological filtration.

I’m sitting about six feet from a fish tank that I built all the filtration for myself. It has no chemical filtration. It has mechanical filtration only by accident. What it does have is about 100 times as much biological filtration as a “normal” store-bought filter for a tank that size would have. (It also has live plants, which serve as backup biological filtration.) Biological filtration is filtration³ and everything else is making the tank look pretty.

The concept behind biological filtration is to make ammonia less toxic. One way to remove ammonia would just be to change the water in the tank constantly. In fact, some large aquariums “filter” their tanks exactly like that, pumping water out of the ocean constantly and sending the old water back. (It’s one reason so many aquariums are right on the waterfront.) However, if you can’t do that maybe you can make the ammonia less toxic so that it doesn’t cause a problem until the water does get changed. This involves converting ammonia into less-toxic nitrite and then converting nitrite into less-toxic nitrate. I said above that 2 ppm of ammonia would be very bad. 2 ppm of nitrate is nothing. I’ve had fish survive short periods in which the nitrates spiked above 100 ppm.

So how do you convert ammonia to nitrate? Several different kinds of bacteria do this⁴ to get energy. So, in effect, all you need to do is provide these bacteria with somewhere to live and then send them water with ammonia to “eat”. These bacteria also need oxygen. Hopefully, your water has enough of this, but a wet/dry filter design (which is a design in which the biological filter stays wet but isn’t submerged) really maximizes this.

CYCLE YOUR TANK. Biological filtration depends on an entire mini-ecosystem in which fish produce ammonia which some bacteria use for food, producing nitrites, which another group of bacteria use for food and produce nitrates. There are no “out of the box” mini-ecosystems. You have to grow one in your filter before you can safely add fish. There are a few ways to do this.

1. There are directions for fishless cycling online. That’s what it will be called. It involves adding ammonia directly to a tank with no fish and monitoring the levels of nitrites and nitrates. Once the ammonia is reliably converted to nitrates in a timely fashion the tank is cycled.
2. You can feed the tank like there were fish in it. The rotting food will produce ammonia just like it would going through a fish. This doesn’t always work perfectly, since you may get the amount wrong, but it’s worked well for me. Mind you, I also follow all the extreme safety tips I give later about adding fish.
3. If you’ve got a large enough tank you can cycle it with some hardy fish (or invertebrates). Guppies work well for freshwater. The idea is simple: a 55-gallon tank can hold far more than a few guppies. If you add a few guppies the sheer volume of water will keep the ammonia concentrations low for a while and give the bacteria in the filter time to start growing. Once that seems to be working well you can (slowly) add other fish.

Cycling takes time. A lot of fish stores (that admit that you need to cycle tanks – some will pretend that you can just plug the filter in and go, probably because that way you’ll be back to buy more fish really soon) will say that it takes a week to cycle a tank. Cycling isn’t binary. A tank can be more or less cycled, and cycling probably continues for months or years, as ecological communities become more complex and shift in composition. I generally cycle for several weeks, and in one case a rather-accidental four months.

So can you cut down on the time to cycle a tank? Yes! And no.

1. You can buy a lot of products that claim to do this. I’ve heard that there is one refrigerated bacterial infusion that may or may not be available in the US that works well. However, most of these are just ways to pay money for something that is free. There are no products that can instantly cycle a tank and you don’t need to buy any products to cycle a tank. One of the major barriers here is that you need live bacteria of the right sort, and keeping bacteria alive in storage with no ammonia for food is hard. Another barrier is that I’m not sure we really know exactly what bacteria are involved in cycling a tank. Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter are obviously important but there’s reason to suspect that this is a complicated story with a lot of ancillary characters.
2. However, you may know people who have live, complete bacterial communities available. These are people with working fish tanks. People such as myself, who have more than enough biological filtration, can often pull a sponge or some media out of a working filter and either drop it in your filter (or tank) or squeeze it out into the tank. This will look like someone just squeezed disgustingly dirty water in a nice clean tank but that “dirt” is the bacteria you need. This can cut cycling time by a lot. You do want to match water type as much as possible. Putting filter material from a saltwater tank into a freshwater tank is probably unhelpful. If your tank is tropical you will probably get better results from a tropical tank, and so on (but any freshwater tank should help some with any other freshwater tank).
3. It is possible to start a tank already cycled. It’s the filter that cycles, not the tank (mostly), so if you take a filter off a working tank and put it on a new tank it’s already cycled. This is most useful if you are moving small fish to a larger tank where they will grow larger. Imagine that you have a 10 gallon tank and just realized that the fish you bought will grow a lot larger than the fish store told you. You want to switch them to your new 40 gallon tank now before they grow larger and let them grow up in that tank. However, you don’t have a cycled 40 gallon filter. No problem! You only have 10 gallons worth of fish right now, so you can move the filter for the 10 gallon tank to the 40 gallon tank and start both filters. In a month both filters will be full of bacteria (the small filter will “seed” the big one) and the small filter will have carried you through the danger period. You can take the small filter off.

As always, a few more important notes about biological filtration:

1. Biological filters get better over time. “Cleaning” a biological filter makes it worse. You’re cleaning off the bacteria that do the work. Yes, they look like sludge (“biofilm” is what a bacterial sludge layer is termed by experts) but they are what makes this all work. Now, sometimes you do need to clean the biological filter because it’s jammed up and water doesn’t move through it but try to do two things. First, clean it in tank water, not chlorinated water. Remember, as far as aquatic organisms are concerned, chlorine is murder. Second, if at all possible clean only part of the filter so the bacteria from the other part can rapidly re-colonize the post-apocalyptic landscape of the cleaned filter. I like filters that have things like two different sponges in the biological filtration section so you can clean one and leave the other alone. (Admittedly, custom filtration is easy when you build your own filters.) I sometimes see people on fish forums say they think their tank has a fish disease when it has ammonia poisoning and so they clean everything really well to kill the germs. This just kills their fish faster.
2. Biological filters are alive. Things like fish medicines can kill parts of them. The wrong temperature or the wrong pH can kill them. If you have a filter go bad that can make a bad day a lethal day for a fish, so if things seem to be going crazy consider that maybe the first problem (temperature, pH, medicine) caused a filter problem.
3. The key to a biological filter is the conversion of ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate. You can buy a test kit for these chemicals at most fish supply stores. This can help you troubleshoot a lot. If, for instance, you see an ammonia spike but no nitrite or nitrate spike the biological filtration isn’t working because lots of ammonia should rapidly become lots of nitrite and so on. If you see a nitrate spike but the other numbers are staying low something bad may have happened but the biological filtration isn’t the problem. The day I wrote this I found a dead fish in a tank in lab. It had probably actually died the day before and been rotting the whole day. I had a bad nitrate spike but the biological filter (homemade out of two pieces of PVC and some high-grade filtration sponge from SwissTropicals) had converted a deadly ammonia spike into an unpleasant nitrate spike.

Change Your Water

All this filtration is great, but even with the best biological filtration in the world your nitrate levels will gradually creep up. There’s no way around that, and the very expensive devices you can buy to hold back the inevitable are not worth it. What is easy is to change the water regularly. Back when I first wrote this I aimed for changing 50% of the water every week. However, that has now changed to something more like 20% of the water per week. I sometimes don’t manage this, but I also test my tanks for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate, and so I know exactly which tanks need water changes. Changing the water is simple: turn off the filter and heaters if they will get dry during this process. Dry filters tend to burn their motors out and dry heaters can sometimes explode. Remove 20% of the water (don’t remove all the water). Dechlorinate more water. Let it sit for a bit to get to room temperature. Add it into the tank. Turn the filter and heaters back on.

Bioload

Your tank plus your water changes plus your biological filtration define your maximum bioload. Bioload is the “load” your animals place on the system. Above a certain amount of living animal tissue⁵ in a tank (be it fish, shrimp, snails, or whatever) and the level of nitrates in the tank will get too high before you change the water. More water dilutes the nitrate, more biological filtration prevents ammonia from staying as ammonia, and more water changes gets rid of all the fish waste faster. I advise you (if you are a beginner) to under-load your tank.

Imagine that your tank can hold 2 pounds of live fish without going toxic. (I’ll discuss how to determine what load you can support in another article.) The temptation is to put 2 lbs of fish in it and have the tank look “alive” with lots of fish, or maybe a really large centerpiece fish. The problem with this it that you have no room for error. I mentioned earlier that I found a dead fish in a tank today. I probably missed that fish yesterday (it had been looking poorly two days ago and yesterday was crazy). That fish went from producing ammonia like a live fish to producing much, much more ammonia as it rotted. If I had that tank stocked at 100% bioload I would have gone over 100% and I probably would have killed all the fish in the tank. Instead, I have that tank understocked. I might be at 40-50% bioload. When a single zebra danio died in the tank that might have temporarily pushed me up closer to 100%, but it didn’t push me over. I did a big water change today and it’s all taken care of.

A lot of my lab tanks do not get optimal maintenance. I under-load them and I don’t ever have issues with them. Meanwhile, I know lots of fish hobbyists who always pack their tanks and have to stay on top of everything. It’s possible to do (I know people who do it) but if you want a casual, low maintenance fish tank avoid the temptation to cram it chock full of fish.

I Wish I’d Known That, But Now It’s an Emergency

So, what if you didn’t read any of this until after you put fish in your tank? You didn’t cycle the tank, you maybe don’t have any kind of filter, and now the fish are acting funny.

1. Get a filter. The right sort, which means one that has biological filtration (it may say this, or it may have a “biowheel”, or it may have sponges that water go through, or it may have media bags that look like broken pottery).
2. When in doubt, water change. Just make sure to dechlorinate.
3. If you need to use an emergency anti-ammonia product go ahead.
4. If you can get filter-gunk from someone with a working tank do it. This will kick-start your cycle.
5. Start testing the water, or getting it tested. What you want to see is the ammonia levels drop and the nitrate levels rise. Once your ammonia is getting converted into nitrates reliably you have a working biological filter and your tank is cycled. This can take a while, especially since you’ll need to be removing ammonia from the tank to keep the fish alive rather than leaving it in to feed the bacteria.

In the next article I’ll discuss choosing tanks, for those who haven’t already committed themselves.