mistakes in fishkeeping

We take a look at some of the biggest mistakes made by fishkeepers – and not just newcomers to the hobby! 

1. Lighting on for too long
In these days of ultra bright lighting you can actually have too much light, and have it on for too long. Your tank only needs light if you grow plants, or corals, and given the choice, your fish would much rather be in the shade.

For plants or corals 10 hours per day is fine, or with very bright lighting you can have an even shorter photo period. Anything over that, or if you just have fish, you will get algae. For a fish only tank just light the tank for viewing - ie when you are at home, sitting in front of it. Ambient room light is fine at all other times, or how about some small LED spotllghts strategically placed, instead of a blanket of light across the whole tank? Algae is the main cause of people leaving the hobby, so stay keen and don't give it an excuse to grow. 

2. Washing your filter media under the tap
This is very common with brand new fishkeepers and is a classic schoolboy error. The filter media harbours beneficial bacteria (beneficial because they convert harmful fish waste into less toxic forms,) yet chlorine and chloramine are put into tapwater by water authorities to kill bacteria. So clean your filter media, but clean it in old tank water, and that mucky water makes great feed for your house and garden plants. 

3. Underfeeding
You probably thought we'd say overfeeding didn't you – but we see many more underfed, rather than overfed fish on our travels. After speaking to many fish nutrition experts we reckon it is pretty difficult for a goldfish to overfeed itself to death for example, and that the resultant water quality issues from overfeeding and  uneaten food are a much more likely cause.

So, feed your fish regularly on a good quality diet and it will be more healthy, better at fighting off disease, and much more likely to breed. 

4. Lack of water changes
If there is one bit of advice that we feel more important than anything else in fishkeeping, it's to change the water. All owners of the best fish, and best aquariums and ponds in the world all change water very often, even when you or I would think there would be no need to.

Water changes dilute pollutants, but they also wash away hormones and pheromones emitted by our fish in their captive environments. Water changes buffer pH, contribute vital trace elements that deplete over time and help to fight algae. Whether you keep plants, corals, cichlids, Discus, goldfish or even trout, change the water. 

5. Overstocking
When compared with nature, our aquariums and ponds aren't as big as they may seem. Small bodies of water only hold small populations of fish, and only with artificial filtration and aeration can we break the rules of nature and place more fish into a given space than it would naturally allow. The result is a much more colourful, busier, more enjoyable spectacle in our living rooms, but that can also lead to stunted growth, heightened aggression and disease. 

Keep smaller fish in a given space, and fewer of them, species requirements allowing, and you will have fewer problems. Want more fish? You're not going to like this, but you'll need to get another tank. 

6. Not quarantining 

We practice what we preach here at PFK and it is amazing the good that quarantining newly purchased fish can do. Many ailments cannot be spotted with the naked eye, and even then few people are skilled with a microscope to identify and then treat disease. So in many respects we are all buying our fish blind, and placing a newly purchased fish into a tank with many other fish from many other sources.

Move over some mature filter media (place a Biofoam 45 sponge inside your external filter,) and when you purchase fish, fill the tank with mature tank water, move the sponge over and you have a mature tank. Place a newly purchased fish into the tank (only one species from one batch, from one source at a time,) leave for several weeks and monitor their health. If you lose the fish, they won't take down the fish in your main tank and getting compensation by way of a replacement fish will be a lot more straightforward as that shop's fish will not have mixed with others and hence, cross contaminated. 

7. Not testing water before purchasing new fish
Whenever you want to buy a fish, you should first test the water of your tank to make sure that water quality is at its optimum. If you have a new tank, you should even test every day for a week before adding fish, just to make sure that there are no spikes. If you place a fish into a tank with failing water quality, you instantly have problems and it will mean stress for you and your new fish. Test water, if it is OK, add fish. If not, don't. 

8. Impulse purchasing
We've all been guilty of this at one point or another. Fish shops are like sweet shops for us addicts, so every now again we spot a tasty looking stripy thing that we just must have.

The problem is that the stripy fish may grow huge, or eat everything, or have requirements that you just can't cater for. Ask an assistant about the fish, tell them what you already have in the tank, and better still take a book or google it on your smart phone.

9. Incorrect use of treatments
We're not fish vets, and neither are 99.99% of the people who keep fish. As mentioned above we cannot spot many ailments and diagnosis can be shaky at best, so if you're not sure, don't just reach for the medication as a matter of course. The more you use a medication, the less effective it will be, and every time you do use one it may knock out some filter bacteria, or weaken a fish.

Find someone who knows about disease, listen to their professional recommendations and dose accordingly. PFK has fish health experts on its panel, some companies have customer advice lines and onboard experts, so use them, and get it right first time. Arm yourself with water quality data, tank stats and a photo of the fish and they will be able to help much more thoroughly.

10. Lack of patience
Fishkeeping is a patient hobby. Plants take time to grow, fish take time to mature and develop adult coloration and finnage, and corals take even longer to grow. These things can't be rushed, and the worse patience related problem is stocking a tank too soon - quicker than the bacteria population can multiply enough to be able to cope.

The weekends are the rush times. You're off work for two days and want to cram everything into that time, including fully stocking a new tank, or putting six months worth of fish additions into six hours. For the sake of your fish, and your sanity, don't do this and as frustrating as it is to just wait, you will save money in medications, test kits and fuel as you frequent the aquatic shop to try and remedy your mistakes.

If you just have to buy something, buy a book or a magazine – or a plant. Don't buy a fish.

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Endangered species

Concerns are rising in Australia for a number of endangered species after a bulk carrier ship ran aground on Christmas Island, releasing oil and phosphate into the surrounding waters.

A stretch of beach 60m long has been affected by the spill and environmentalists are worried about the welfare of a number of animals including whale sharks, coral, 17 species of endemic land crab and at least two varieties of birds.

The 78m Panamanian-flagged 'MV Tycoon' was being loaded with phosphate fertiliser in Flying Fish Cove when it broke from its mooring on Sunday. The crew were safely evacuated but weather conditions were so bad that it soon broke in half and began to sink.

The Australian Maritime Safety Association has estimated that about 102 tonnes of intermediate fuel oil, 11,000 l. of lubricant oil, 32 tonnes of diesel oil and approximately 260 tonnes of phosphate were on board the vessel and that the majority of this will have been released into the sea.

Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Toby Stone said: "The bad news is that there could be no containment operation because of the very severe swell and weather conditions.

"But, there's a positive side to that; the bad weather has helped to break up and disperse a lot of the oil naturally."

However, Conservation Council of WA environmental science and policy coordinator Nic Dunlop who used to live on the island is concerned that January is a critical time in the biological cycles of many of the species there. Any land crabs returning to shore after spawning will face a coastline contaminated by oils and phosphate. Today has seen some red crabs start to come ashore which is a good sign but he is also worried that the whale sharks may suffer too:

"The whale sharks come to Christmas Island specifically to feed on the land crab larvae and they could be ingesting contaminates in the process of foraging. They are particularly at risk from this event."

A marine casualty coordinator and pollution expert has been brought in to assess the damage but currently everything is on hold until the weather improves. Meanwhile, islanders remain concerned that food supplies may not be able to reach the island and that their tourism may be affected. A number have already offered their help when the clean-up finally gets under way.

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Marine Pollution

The oceans are so vast and deep that until fairly recently, it was widely assumed that no matter how much trash and chemicals humans dumped into them, the effects would be negligible. Proponents of dumping in the oceans even had a catchphrase: "The solution to pollution is dilution."

Today, we need look no further than the New Jersey-size dead zone that forms each summer in the Mississippi River Delta, or the thousand-mile-wide swath of decomposing plastic in the northern Pacific Ocean to see that this "dilution" policy has helped place a once flourishing ocean ecosystem on the brink of collapse.

Pollution's Many Forms
There is evidence that the oceans have suffered at the hands of mankind for millennia, as far back as Roman times. But recent studies show that degradation, particularly of shoreline areas, has accelerated dramatically in the past three centuries as industrial discharge and runoff from farms and coastal cities has increased.

Pollution is the introduction of harmful contaminants that are outside the norm for a given ecosystem. Common man-made pollutants that reach the ocean include pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, detergents, oil, sewage, plastics, and other solids. Many of these pollutants collect at the ocean's depths, where they are consumed by small marine organisms and introduced into the global food chain. Scientists are even discovering that pharmaceuticals ingested by humans but not fully processed by our bodies are eventually ending up in the fish we eat.

Many ocean pollutants are released into the environment far upstream from coastlines. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers applied by farmers inland, for example, end up in local streams, rivers, and groundwater and are eventually deposited in estuaries, bays, and deltas. These excess nutrients can spawn massive blooms of algae that rob the water of oxygen, leaving areas where little or no marine life can exist. Scientists have counted some 400 such dead zones around the world.

Solid waste like bags, foam, and other items dumped into the oceans from land or by ships at sea are frequently consumed, with often fatal effects, by marine mammals, fish, and birds that mistake it for food. Discarded fishing nets drift for years, ensnaring fish and mammals. In certain regions, ocean currents corral trillions of decomposing plastic items and other trash into gigantic, swirling garbage patches. One in the North Pacific, known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is estimated to be the size of Texas. A new, massive patch was discovered in the Atlantic Ocean in early 2010. 

Noise Pollution
Pollution is not always physical. In large bodies of water, sound waves can carry undiminished for miles. The increased presence of loud or persistent sounds from ships, sonar devices, oil rigs, and even from natural sources like earthquakes can disrupt the migration, communication, hunting, and reproduction patterns of many marine animals, particularly aquatic mammals like whales and dolphins.

End of the "Dilution" Era
Humans are beginning to see the shortsightedness of the "dilution" philosophy. Many national laws as well as international protocols now forbid dumping of harmful materials into the ocean, although enforcement can often be spotty. Marine sanctuaries are being created to maintain pristine ocean ecosystems. And isolated efforts to restore estuaries and bays have met with some success.

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How to Save Our Coral

Coral on a Reef

The water is blue and warm, the visibility is perfect. There might be no better place in the world to learn to scuba dive than the glassy seas around Key West, at the southernmost tip of the U.S. As I gradually master my buoyancy and hover 15 feet below the surface, I can see schools of small yellow groupers beneath the dive boat giving wide berth to a blade of a barracuda. A spiny lobster shyly crawls across the seafloor. This colorful diversity of life — like swimming through a tropical aquarium — is all thanks to the shallow coral reefs that exist west of Key West. The world's reefs are the bases for sea life — home to a quarter of all the fish on the planet.

But even though this was my first time diving in the Florida Keys, I could tell something was wrong. Most of the fish were small, and there wasn't much evidence of the larger predators whose presence is the mark of a healthy marine environment. Worst of all were the corals themselves — broken bits of white coral littered the ground like bones at a half-finished burial, their lack of color proof that they were dead. "Diving in the Florida Keys was incredibly depressing," says John Hocevar, oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, who just finished a trip to the Keys and the nearby Dry Tortugas. "I could see how rapidly things had declined over the past 20 years." 

Florida isn't the only place where coral reefs are in trouble. Everywhere, reefs are under pressure from rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification, coastal pollution and physical damage. There has already been a major coral bleaching event in Indonesia this summer, in which more than 60% of the coral off the coast of Aceh province has been affected. (Bleaching occurs when heat drives out algae living inside coral tissue; it's an indicator of stress that can eventually kill coral populations outright.) Thanks to the El Niño phenomenon, which often leads to higher-than-normal sea temperatures in parts of the world, this could be one of the worst years ever for coral death — and the gradual warming caused by climate change may only make things worse in the future.

"Coral reefs are incredibly important to ocean health," says Stephanie Wear, the Nature Conservancy's coral expert. "But if we don't act, we could lose 70% of reefs worldwide by the middle of the century."

Perhaps the most direct human-caused threat to coral reefs is coastal pollution. That's the case for the troubled coral reefs of the Keys, which are badly weakened by fertilizer runoff from Florida's agricultural sector. Sediment from runoff on land can cover corals or simply turn the water cloudy, cutting them off from the sunlight they need to survive. (There's a reason coral reefs tend to be found in brilliantly clear water.) The nutrients found in fertilizer — phosphates and nitrogen — can also cause algal blooms, which can smother coral, and low-oxygen dead zones, which aren't much better for them. Overfishing can also upset the delicate ecological balance coral reefs depend on to thrive. And increasingly, dense development along coastlines with reefs — particularly in the heavily affected Caribbean or the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia — is doing still more damage. 

But the truly long-term threats to corals are warming oceans and acidification — both of which are at least partly due to climate change. Corals are actually tiny organisms that join together in colonies, and they depend on a symbiotic relationship with certain species of algae to produce energy through photosynthesis. (It's the algae that give coral reefs their brilliant colors.) But when the water warms — maybe about 1°C to 1.5°C (1.8°F to 2.7°F) above the average high temperature — it throws off that symbiotic relationship, and eventually the coral reject the algae. What's left is the white coral — hence the term bleaching. "If the corals don't recover within a month or two, they'll die," says Wear.

One of the worst mass bleaching events in history occurred in 1998 — which, incidentally, was also one of the hottest years on record, and like 2010, an El Niño year. Globally some 16% of coral reefs died in 1998. This year — which is on track to be the warmest year in recorded history — could be just as bad. While much of that heat is due to independent weather phenomena like El Niño, as climate change warms the atmosphere, it will warm the seas as well — until they could become too hot for corals no matter the year. And since the oceans absorb much of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere, they're slowly becoming more acidic — which over time will make it tougher for corals to build reefs. (They will literally dissolve in more acidic oceans.) "Rising CO2 levels just spell really bad news for corals," says Wear.

Consider that one more reason — of many — to work to reduce carbon emissions in the decades ahead. But in the meantime, there is more we can do now to protect coral reefs. Preventing soil and nutrient runoff from farming near coastlines can help, as can managing coastal development, especially in smaller, crowded islands. Reducing overfishing — especially of predators at the top of the aquatic food chain — adds another layer of defense to endangered reefs. But most of all we need to create more protected areas in the oceans. Less than 1% of the oceans are afforded any protection whatsoever, compared with some 10% of land. Unless we stop treating the oceans like a shared sewer, coral reefs won't survive. "Climate change will be tough enough," says Wear. "We need to do whatever we can to reduce stresses right now if corals are going to have a chance." Otherwise, the oceans' most vibrant areas could become underwater graveyards.

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