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Salt Water Aquarium - Trouble Shooting

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Jim Karanikas: Hi! Jim Karanikas from Tropical Fish World. I am here at Dr. Rick Fritze's Orthodontix office in Gaithersburg, Maryland to show you one of this huge 400 gallon aquariums here that he installed. So his clients can sit and watch a beautiful fish tank while they are getting their teeth work doing.

We have talked a little bit today about how to set up a marine aquarium and now I'd like to talk to you about troubleshooting, because when I took over these aquariums they had some problems with algae. And the two major problems that you are going to have in a marine aquarium are either algae or diseases.

Algae is very opportunistic and it will grow on any surfaces in the aquarium on the front glass, and it will even grow in the water if you have enough light which is aquarium does have and if you have enough nutrients to support the algae. So you can either minimize the amount of light that you have on the aquarium to control the algae or you can control the amount of nutrients that are in the water.

One of the ways that we fix the algae problem in this aquarium was that we started to use the ionized water to do our water changes. If you are using tap water to clean your aquarium and change the water the tap water, most municipalities have a lot of nutrients that will grow algae already in them so that when you put that in your tank you are going to grow more algae than what you would like.

So I use the ionized water in this aquarium, I bring a container over that, I run the water through and it actually cleans out the nutrients from the tap water before it goes into the aquarium, and this as you can see has done a tremendous job of cleaning up the aquarium.

Second major problem you have in a marine aquarium are diseases or parasites. Diseases and parasites in soft water fish probably attribute to 90% of the deaths that you will have in an aquarium. Unfortunately, all the fish when they are collected usually have some form of a parasite on their body and they are very tricky to identify and to even notice that the fish have them on them.

Usually by quarantining your fish for 20-30 days, during that quarantine time you should use a medicine either a copper medicine or a copper formalin medicine and make sure they are free of parasites before you put them in your tank.

And this concludes the video tape series on setting up and maintaining a marine aquarium. I hope the information I provided you has been useful and good luck with keeping your tank.

Expert: Jim Karanikas

Marine Biologist

www.tropicalfishworld.com

P: (301)921-0000

Email: Tfw99@aol.com

Jim has over thirty years experience working in a tropical fish store. He started cleaning aquariums for a local pet store at the age of 13. He has kept most every kind of aquarium fish and was one of the first people to successfully breed marine angelfish in captivity. His love for the water got him involved in competitive swimming and coaching. He still swims with a Masters program and recently More »