Asked
to name the real secret to keeping saltwater aquarium
successfully, to avoid serious problems and the loss
of fishes, what would you say? Buying the right specimens?
Disease control? Good feeding? All of these things are
critical, but keeping water quality up is arguably the
most important.
What
is this mythical beast, this water quality that we are
constantly reminded to track, to tame, and keep under
control? For the majority of problems situations and
circumstances in a saltwater aquarium, what we are talking
about is water quality. Of the controllable variables
of aquariculture,
it is the part of the equation that most often comes
apart and leads to trouble.
Everything
about the health of saltwater aquarium is tied to water
quality. If you are fishes appear ill, check the quality
of your water before you do anything else. More aquatic
life has been saved by moving specimens to new water
or executing a massive water change then by using all
the available medications combined. I would say that
the great majority of livestock problems in the home
aquarium start and end with the water and how it is
managed by the aquarist.
Let's work our way into a definition of what good water
quality is and how it is best approximated. You won't
have to become a chemist or physicist, I promise. Two
sources exist for the aquarist filling a marine tank:
natural seawater or synthetic salt mix added to fresh
water. Real salt water is used by very few hobbyists
due to its many serious drawbacks: the cost and time
involved in hauling and treating the water; the lack
of life-support or buffering; and the dangers of introducing
undesirable pests and pollution.
Check
the hobby magazines and you won't see many advertisements
promoting gear for collecting, handling, or manipulating
real seawater. Synthetic mixes are almost universally
employed for captive systems, large and small. Huge
public saltwater aquariums year-end use them, including
the new national aquarium at Baltimore. Even though
it's right on the bay, the experts who manage it makes
up and recirculate hundreds of thousands of gallons
of synthetic seawater-and for good biological reasons
that should comfort any new aquarist who worries that
he or she can't get real seawater.
For
small, saltwater aquariums, artificial seawater is highly
preferred. It's convenient, cost effective, and supports
all forms of marine life. This was not, however, always
the case.
One
of the original questions back during the formulators
of synthetic seawater in saltwater aquariums was,"how
important is it to match the seized chemical makeup
exactly?" The first synthetic sea salt formulations
met with little success biologically. These mixes for
saltwater aquariums were the initial attempts by chemists
as a perfect duplication of nature, and they didn't
work. In the 1950s moderately successful mixes were
made that focused on imitating the oceans major constituents
only, adding small amounts of trace materials as they
seemed to be needed. In the United States in the early
1960s, W.E.Kelly, and Richard Segedi it the Cleveland
aquarium significantly improved the 1950s mixes by lowering
costs and further defining the concentration of certain
trace elements. Today, in all saltwater aquariums, the
salt water mixes created by these gentlemen are used
to ensure the success of livestock.
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