Aquarium filtration is vital to an aquarium’s success. Your aquarium filtration system needs to be functioning properly to ensure that your fish remain healthy.
However, just what is aquarium filtration all about?
Lots of people believe that filtration is a process that involves a random machine in the tank, and also cleaning the tank twice a month. There are all kinds of filtration methods to aid in keeping your fish healthy, but none of them can give you a guarantee.
Mechanical Filtration – This is what most of us see when we look at a typical aquarium: a mechanical pump that sucks water, screens it using some fine material or cloth to sift the water, and then releases that water back into the tank to aerate the water. Finer filter material is more effective but also gets clogged more quickly. So unless you have some serious waste problems in your tank try and find a filter screen that strikes a balance between efficiency and permeability.
Mechanical aquarium filtration serves to filter out the solid particles like waste and grit from the water. Doing this is absolutely necessary, and it will help you to maintain a tidy and healthy tank. However, we have to look beyond what we can see and look at the invisible problems plaguing a typical fish tank aquarium.
Water, especially water that comes from the tap, has certain compounds that get dissolved in it. These compounds accumulate over time, as they cannot be filtered by mechanical means, and have the potential to kill your fish once they reach toxic-enough levels.
Chemical aquarium filtration involves using high-grade ‘granular activated carbon’ to absorb these dissolved compounds. Super-heating certain materials at 2000-degrees Fahrenheit eliminates all gases leaving an altered material composition void of gas. This lack of gases in the material makes it absorb these invisible compounds like a sponge.
But these carbons will eventually become saturated with compounds, needing replacement. Some stores that sell supplies for aquaria will make the claim that the job can be done effectively with charcoal, but it is much more effective to use activated carbon for absorption of these compounds.
Biological Filtration – As your fish go about the business of living their day-to-day lives, the respiration and waste-production process will produce a certain substance: ammonia. This ammonia, which also comes from decaying matter, is very toxic to fish when it builds up long enough in your tank, and is the most-often overlooked of all the filtration types.
Thus, biological chemical filtration is needed to break down this ammonia into a harmless substance called nitrate. First, Nitrosomonas bacteria will digest the ammonia, converting it to nitrite. The nitrite is much too harmful to fish, and it also must be processed by Nitrobacter bacteria in order to produce the nitrate.
If there aren’t enough of these bacteria, new fish owners can discover that their fish have died. This is the reason that you should buy cheaper, low-risk test fish to ‘break in’ the aquarium for the mor expensive fish. Because you still require a mixture of Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter to operate and properly filter your tank this is the primary reason that not every bit of water gets removed with cleansing the tank.
Tags: aquarium filtration, diatom filtration, fluidized bed filtration, power filtration, sponge filtration