Saturday, June 10, 2006
Aquarium
Good morning,
A home aquarium with minimal cost and maintenance.
For relaxation, one will have difficulty finding anything to match an aquarium. Watching the fish and their antics will very quickly let one forget about everything except what one is looking at.
For a grand scale view, there are the Undersea World, the beautiful display aquariums of the vendors, or the exhibition aquariums at classy establishments or shopping centres. For all these, one has to make a trip.
Well, one can always have one at home. And it needs not have to be very costly if one knows how. Go to any vendor, and he will quote you a grand or so for a 4 by 1.5 by 1.5 feet tank. For those who know how, they will just need a couple of hundred bucks or so. No tricks here ! One can buy a second hand fish tank for $10 to $20 from Cash Converter to begin with.
Naturally, fish needs water to live in and food to survive. So, provide the water and the food. The significant requirement is that the water must be well maintained. In an ecology, fish produce waste and carbon dioxide; plants in the water exchange the carbon dioxide with oxygen and use up the waste, and grow. The plants in turn need sunlight; sunlight is with us the whole year through. With this knowledge, all that is required is to create the same environment in the fish tank, right ?
Yes ! I have had a 4 by 1.5 by 1.5 ft. aquarium for over thirty years, without special lighting and aeration. It has a 2 inch layer of coarse sand, some plants, and a few decorative rocks and corals. It is in my car porch, exposed to ambient sunlight, that's all. To control the growth of algae, I have a couple of vacuum cleaners, algae eating fish or other, and snails.
The sunlight cares for the plants, the plants care for the water, the water keeps the fish alive. All I have to do is to provide the fish food. Once in a couple of weeks I put in a dollar's worth of tubifex worms; these live in the sand until, you know how, they disappeared. At other times, I serve them hard boiled egg yolk or messed up steam fish. Kitchen wastes, like the discarded parts of prawns, fish, meat, squids, vegetables and okay, expired vitamin tablets, are my ingredients for making my own fish food. My backup for fish food, when I am lazy to make the fish food, are the colourful commercial pellets which cost more than what we eat. Plants do not need to be replaced; in fact, one has to reduce them regularly. The cost of the fish depends on how extravagant one wants to be.
Over the years, my tank has been the world for breeding angelfish, all kinds of tetras, zebras, sword tails, mollies, discus, moon fish, lobsters, and whatever the vendors had, according to my fancy and the time I could spare. The piranhas were outlawed, the oscars splashed out most of the water when they spawned, and the lobsters made a mess of the whole tank; they burrowed and churned up all the rocks like bulldozers; imagine about eighty bulldozers at work. The tetras are the best; there are so many different types, and they are peaceful community fish. The zebras can zip very fast and turn around about itself.
There is nothing more relaxing than viewing the fish in an aquarium !
Have a nice day
Ronald
A home aquarium with minimal cost and maintenance.
For relaxation, one will have difficulty finding anything to match an aquarium. Watching the fish and their antics will very quickly let one forget about everything except what one is looking at.
For a grand scale view, there are the Undersea World, the beautiful display aquariums of the vendors, or the exhibition aquariums at classy establishments or shopping centres. For all these, one has to make a trip.
Well, one can always have one at home. And it needs not have to be very costly if one knows how. Go to any vendor, and he will quote you a grand or so for a 4 by 1.5 by 1.5 feet tank. For those who know how, they will just need a couple of hundred bucks or so. No tricks here ! One can buy a second hand fish tank for $10 to $20 from Cash Converter to begin with.
Naturally, fish needs water to live in and food to survive. So, provide the water and the food. The significant requirement is that the water must be well maintained. In an ecology, fish produce waste and carbon dioxide; plants in the water exchange the carbon dioxide with oxygen and use up the waste, and grow. The plants in turn need sunlight; sunlight is with us the whole year through. With this knowledge, all that is required is to create the same environment in the fish tank, right ?
Yes ! I have had a 4 by 1.5 by 1.5 ft. aquarium for over thirty years, without special lighting and aeration. It has a 2 inch layer of coarse sand, some plants, and a few decorative rocks and corals. It is in my car porch, exposed to ambient sunlight, that's all. To control the growth of algae, I have a couple of vacuum cleaners, algae eating fish or other, and snails.
The sunlight cares for the plants, the plants care for the water, the water keeps the fish alive. All I have to do is to provide the fish food. Once in a couple of weeks I put in a dollar's worth of tubifex worms; these live in the sand until, you know how, they disappeared. At other times, I serve them hard boiled egg yolk or messed up steam fish. Kitchen wastes, like the discarded parts of prawns, fish, meat, squids, vegetables and okay, expired vitamin tablets, are my ingredients for making my own fish food. My backup for fish food, when I am lazy to make the fish food, are the colourful commercial pellets which cost more than what we eat. Plants do not need to be replaced; in fact, one has to reduce them regularly. The cost of the fish depends on how extravagant one wants to be.
Over the years, my tank has been the world for breeding angelfish, all kinds of tetras, zebras, sword tails, mollies, discus, moon fish, lobsters, and whatever the vendors had, according to my fancy and the time I could spare. The piranhas were outlawed, the oscars splashed out most of the water when they spawned, and the lobsters made a mess of the whole tank; they burrowed and churned up all the rocks like bulldozers; imagine about eighty bulldozers at work. The tetras are the best; there are so many different types, and they are peaceful community fish. The zebras can zip very fast and turn around about itself.
There is nothing more relaxing than viewing the fish in an aquarium !
Have a nice day
Ronald
# posted by chunmu @ 6:13 PM 
