Basic Water Quality Info

[harif87]

To start this off i must say that no fish can live peacfully without a cycled tank. What does this mean you ask? Allow me to explain.

Water quality is the number one concern of all aquarist. This is because the life of the fish you are keeping depend on how well you maintain the tanks water. Water quality is based not only on the visable matter found in it but is very much based on those little chemicals that we cant see (as well as other factors such as temperature etc but this article won't go into that). There are 3 main focus chemicals that get the spotlight when discussing water quality, and they are Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrite. Ammonia is the fist one we will discuss.

Ammonia (NH3) is a chemical that is let into the water via fish excretion and rotting matter, such as plant leaves and rotting food caused by overfeeding. The amount of ammonia found in a system (and by that i mean a fish tank) is directly proportionate to the amount of food supplied to the system regardless to whether a system is overfed or not. Ammonia is a toxic chemical to fish which is why it must be taken out of the system. Water changes and other means are used to get the ammonia out of the fish's water. Unless your prepared to do water changes all your life once every 2 days to get the ammonia out of the water your in luck since there is another way to handle this nuisance. We take care of it the way nature does out in the wild, which is to let a special strain of bacteria called "nitrifying bacteria" to chane Ammonia (NH3) into Nitrite(NO2). The name of the bacteria belived to change ammonia into nitrite is Nistrosomonas europae. The way we get this population of nitrifying bacteria is by supplying our system with a source of ammonia (luckily the thing were trying to get rid of is, in turn, the bacteria's food! Got to love nature!) and wait untill our Nitrosomonas colonize our filters, gravelbed and decorations.

So now we have our bacteria that takes ammonia and turns it into nitrite. Which means that we now have a bunch of nitrite on our hands, which is also nothing but trouble for our fish! What we do is wait some more (while keeping a constant supply of ammonia to our lovely nitrosomonas) and in time there will come another strain of bacteria that ingests the Nitrite and turns it into Nitrate, which is not toxic to fish at normal levels. I will not mention the name of the strain that turns Nitrite into Nitrate because it is not yet 100% known which is the real strain that converts nitrite. It was previously belived that the strain under the gebus Nitrobacter was responsible for this, but recent studies have shown that the true genus may truly beNitrospira. Both being nitrifying bacteria that converts nitrite into nitrate, they are the two sides of a controversy started in the mid-1990's. But thats off topic...... Once a tank has both thse strains of bacteria (Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter/Nitrospira) a tank is dubbed "Cycled". This term means that our butts are saved from this ammonia and nitrite stuff, and that saved us from alot of water changes!!

Don't get your hopes up too high; water changes are still neccessary to rid the tank of nitrate. Although it's not toxic to fish at moderate levels, high levels of nitrate are dangerous for our fish. An average cycled tank requires water changes about once every 1-2 weeks. An uncylced aquarium tends to need water changes once every 2 days. As one could see it is much easier to care for a cycled aquarium than to care for an uncycled one. The lack of toxic ammonia in a system's water means better water quality, and better water quality means happier fish that live longer. So go cycle your tank if you haven't done so yet, or the results won't be pretty!