Filthy Fish

by Aimee Amodio | More from this Blogger

24 Apr 2008 05:31 PM

For an animal that lives in the water... fish sure are dirty!

I might not have even realized this if not for my job at the cats only boarding facility. We have an aquarium and three fish for the kitties to watch during the day. It's probably a fifteen or twenty gallon tank, I'd guess.

Over the weekend, I decided to roll up my sleeves and clean the fish tank. That's when I learned the dirty truth about our little fishy friends.

Safety first! Always unplug all electrical equipment before doing anything to or in your aquarium. Ours has three plugs -- one for the lights, one for the filter, and one for the heater. I unplugged all three, then lifted the cords so any stray drips wouldn't go into the outlet strip.

We have a motorless vacuum thingy to use when doing partial water changes. As far as I know, it works by water pressure. You submerge one end, then let the bubbles out, and kind of jiggle it around a little, and suddenly it's sucking water out of the tank. Okay, not a very scientific explanation! The nozzle is shaped so you can suck up gravel (and debris in the gravel) without the gravel actually going through the tube and ending up in the bucket.

And that was when I learned how dirty fish are. There was more gunk in the gravel than the little vacuum and my partial water change could handle. Our bucket holds about five gallons of water, or approximately one third of the tank's capacity. (You don't want to change all the water at once; the dramatic change in water conditions could be deadly to your fish.)

Some of it was waste; some of it was uneaten food. And I guess some of the gunk was algae? The filter intake was pretty plugged up with some kind of brown-green goo. I had to get creative to clear it out (let's just say it involved a toothbrush AND a straightened paper clip before the tube was clean).

The debris that was kicked up into the water by all my cleaning was mostly picked up by the filter... so the tank is clean-ish for now.

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