Tag: Aquatics

Can I keep my aquarium in my bedroom?

The important thing is a nice even level service on something strong enough to take the weight, which could well be a chest of drawers in a bedroom.  Certainly you do have to check it will take the weight you want to put on it.

You will probably be OK sleeping with the noise of a quiet filter. One should never switch the filter off for the night and then switch it on again in the morning.  And neither can you do that to the heater. The light you do switch off, and then it is a question of either remembering to switch it on in the morning or having a timer switch.

Just make sure there’s still room for the bed!

There is nothing unhealthy about sleeping next to a fishtank, if that’s what you are worried about. As long as you keep it clean. The exception is if you keep an octopus as this will wait till you go to sleep and then lift the lid, sneak out and get on your face like that thing out of alien. Just kidding.

 

My own case

I personally have been sleeping with a tank filter in the room working all night for maybe twenty years or more as indeed I did as a boy. I rarely get disturbed by the filter noise – only if it is lying against something which reverberates. If you have this problem then either use suction pads or adjust the position of the filter vis a vis the hood.  This is actually a good argument for avoiding the kind of tank sets where everything is built together.
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My betta fish is making a bubble nest, but I have no other fish, he’s the only one. Why is he making it?

He doesn’t know that he is in captivity. He doesn’t know you don’t have any intention of giving him a female. He only wants to be ready if one turns up.

Either he has worked out that he depends on you for everything, and his internal monologue is as follows:

“This big monkey gives me my food, fresh water and everything else, so when he sees I am ready to breed, he will also provide the female”.

Or else he has gone through a kind of utilitarian monologue in his brain, saying to himself:

“The existence of a desire for something predicts that it exists. I desire food when I am hungry and food comes. I desire for there to be an existence of God, and then God comes to me in my dreams. Now I desire the existence of something else, I don’t know what it is yet, but I know it must be something to do with that thing up there I got strangely driven to build out of my sticky saliva, and air. And when the thing that it is for comes along, I’ll know what it is.”

 

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Are fish tanks cruel?

Are fish tanks cruel? It depends. If the fish tank is too small for the fish or the equipment in it and water changes all in combination aren’t giving the right quality of water, heat and light then that’s cruel for at least those species of fish that aren’t being catered for. Fish also have the right to hidey holes where they can enjoy their privacy for the species that need it. Of course, some individuals within a species might need it more than others. Fish differ not only between species but within a species. They even differ in their behaviour within one spawning of fry. Such is life, for organisms that reproduce sexually. It is one of the so-called “joys of sex” that Alex Comfort neglected to mention as he was more concerned with the prurient. In fact, I hope my readers haven’t even heard of him.

BB Radio – einfach der beste Mix

The mix of fish is what people tend to get wrong the most though. Putting together fish of different sizes so that the smaller ones end up getting eaten is not fair on them. Also, you should not put fin-nippers or biters like barbs or puffer fish or overly playful fish like botias in with delicate fish which don’t like to be chased around, like discus or mormyrids. Everyone should know not to mix two male Bettas, but you could have a similar result over a longer period with a lot of kinds of cichlids. When you breed fish not taking care to have males and females from separate bloodstock, this also can lead to unintentional cruelty. That is because the number of young with genetic issues and deformities is likely to be higher.

Nuh’un gemisi sizin evdedir

If you avoid those problems, there is nothing intrinsically cruel about the aquarium hobby. Our well-maintained aquarium fishes have a much better quality of life much better than that in the wild. Whole species are now being maintained in hobbyist collections which are extinct in the wild. The German hobby and Hans-Georg Evers in particular brought the Noah’s Ark capability of our hobby to peoples attention already in the 1980s.

Many livebearers and even cherry barbs are maintained despite habitat destruction in captive collections.  Other hobbyists have gone so far as to describe species to science which they have found wither coming through trade channels or in their own explorations of the Amazon.

The image shows Brachyrhamdia marthae, named by my old friend and mentor Dr. David D. Sands in honour of his then wife. David Sands used to write many articles promoting non-cruel fishkeeping, avoiding for instance keeping very large fish like red-tailed catfishes in small fish tanks where they would not thrive.

I hope some aquarists reading this will aspire to be part of some cottage conservation project, and dedicate some nice tanks to this idea.

Aqua cuna vitae, ager nobis

So, you see why it depends. Depending on what you do with your tank it can be heaven or hell for your piscine companions. In itself it is not cruel, it is a set of panes of glass.

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If an enemy ran up to a tank and tried to put C4s on it, what would the tank driver do?

Someone asked me to answer this as a fish tanks question.  It doesn’t look like the fish kind of tank, but if it is, then I imagine the tank owner will remove himself from the vicinity as quickly as possible on seeing the C4s, whatever they are.  If there are irreplaceable fish inside he might try to net them and carry them away in a carrier bag with water. For sure he or she will look for a replacement aquarium quickly. Obviously it’s not a situation any fishkeeper hopes for.

Supplementary question

A Quoran called Patrick Zhong then replied to the above with the question “Please inform, how do you drive a fish tank?”.

 

I replied “Very carefully, otherwise all the water slops out when you accelerate, brake, or turn corners.” Patrick then said “And how do I safely turn the fish tank in place at high rotational speeds to generate a whirlpool without killing all the fish?” My answer to this is as follows:
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Some Q&A about Aquatics (Quora #4)

A couple of Saturdays ago I started a series which was intended to reproduce my inputs on Quora over here on this blog, as a repurposing and collating of them as well as a way of making sure I don’t lose my own content. Once again I recently had a warning from Quora just for letting another Englishman know thatt in saying no Englishman likes Donald Trump he took rather too much on himself as there are those of us who do. This was enough to have a second warning from Quora and so now I need to accelerate the copying over of my own work from that site in case I lose all those hours of work and creativity. Where there is moderation, there is limited trust.

At first I did one article per post, but there are quite a lot of briefer answers and it makes little sense to copy these over in that format, so now I have in mind to produce more answers in a single post, based around onne theme, and I have been preparing lists that analyse these articles into common themes. Last time in #3 we took a few articles I had written about Betta splendens, the Siamese fighting fish. These answers gave rise to more questions for me to answer (Quora has A2A, or Ask to Answer where people get invited to answer, either because the person asking knows them or they are suggested by the software. Alternatively you can jump in and give an answer on whatever appears on your screen. If you have opted to receive emails, you get a feed from Quora or items that may interest you) and these questions started to be about fishkeeping or aquatics in more general terms, and even (to be looked at later on) about ichthyology. Inevitably I also started to receive questions about sport fishing and I have zero time for that. I am ready to talk about fishery as part of the food industry, but not about angling, fly fishing or any of these sadistic pseudosports.

Please remember that my answers vary a lot from facetious to informative usually depending on my mood, the time available and what I think about the question. Be prepared for a rather broad range of approaches to questions. Quora goes from highly intellectual Q&A to the dumbest things a human being can write or read. I try to vary my own tone to match the quality of the question.

If you want to discuss or ask anything else around these themes, please get a discussion going in the comments. It’s what the comment facility is there for. I hope it is not onerous to log on and make some kind of utterance.

My own Heros severus.

As mentioned in the title, the theme for today is aquatics, and these answers were given by me all in 2015-2016.

1. Can you overfeed fish? How do you avoid doing so?

You can always add more food but it is harder to take it out. Give enough for everything to be eaten in a few minutes and feed morning and evening. You can leave raw carrot pieces or washed lettuce leaves – not much – or the skins of fresh cucumbers in there for them to eat more gradually.

Feeding too much will cause a nitrate hike, it has a demand on oxygen and will generally poison the fish as well as cause bacterial blooms and too much growth of algae.

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