Aquarium stories for children

Your fish needs six things.

Your fish needs clean water. Water is where a fish lives. It is the home. It is the air too.

Yes, the air. A fish breathes air. The air is in the water. You cannot see it. It gets in at the top.

Your fish needs food. It needs a little food, one time each day. Too much food is bad. It makes the water dirty.

Your fish needs room to swim. A small box is not enough room.

Most fish need friends. Six friends is good. But some fish must live alone. Ask before you buy a fish.

Your fish needs a place to hide. A cave. A big leaf. A stone with a hole in it.

Do you want to see your fish all day? Your fish does not want that. It needs to hide some days. That is fine. Let it hide.

Your tank is not ready yet. We must wait.

Here is why. Fish make a mess in the water. You cannot see the mess. But it is there, and it can hurt them.

So we need help. There are tiny things that eat the mess. They are alive. They are much too small to see. They live in the filter.

Right now there are only a few of them. They must grow. A big family of them takes a long time to grow.

That is why we wait. We wait some weeks. Not days. Weeks.

Color one box each week on your chart. Test the water each week. When the test says the water is safe, they are ready. Then your fish can come home.

Every fish makes waste. You cannot see it, but it is in the water.

Here is the strange part. A fish does not push most of its waste out the back. It pushes it out through its gills. A fish breathes its waste out into the water.

That waste is a poison. If it builds up, it will hurt the fish that made it.

So who cleans it? Tiny living things do. They are far too small to see. They live in your filter, on the sponge, in the dark. Nobody put them there. They came in on their own and they stayed.

These tiny helpers do two jobs, one after the other.

First job. They eat the waste. But when they eat it, they make a new thing. That new thing is a poison too. This is the part most people do not know.

Second job. They eat that new thing as well. Now they make a third thing. The third thing is much safer. Your plants can even use it as food.

So there are three things, and they come in order.

1. The waste. Very bad.
2. The middle thing. Also bad.
3. The leftover. Mostly safe. Plant food.

You can see all this with a test kit. You cannot see the helpers, but you can see their work. That color on the card is your proof.

Here is what to expect. In the first week or two, test one goes high. Then it drops, and test two goes high. Then that drops too. When both are at zero, your tank is ready.

It takes weeks. Some tanks take two weeks. Some tanks take eight. Nobody can tell you which one you will get, so do not let anyone promise you a date.

Why so slow? Because the helpers have to grow. At the start there are only a few. They have to become a whole crowd, and growing takes time. It takes time for you too.

A fish in a round bowl is short of air.

Here is why. Air gets into water only at the top, where the water touches the room. So what matters is not how much water there is. What matters is how wide the top is.

A bowl is round. It is wide in the middle and narrow at the top. So when you fill a bowl right up, the top is tiny. Very little air can get in.

Now try this. Take some water out. Fill the bowl only up to the widest part. The top is now much wider. Much more air can get in.

That sounds wrong, and it is still true. A bowl works better with less water in it.

Here are four things you can do today.

1. Take water out, down to the widest part.
2. Change some of the water more often than you do now.
3. Do not add a second fish. A bowl is one home for one fish.
4. Show this page to a grown up and ask about a bigger tank.

A bowl is a hard home for a fish. That is not your fault. Nobody told you. But you know now, and you can make it better today.

Your fish did not start in a shop. It started in a real place, and that place is on the map.

Look at your neon tetra. Its home river is in Brazil, in a forest called the Amazon. The water there is not blue. It is the color of strong tea. Dead leaves fall in the river and stain it brown. The tetra has lived in brown water for a very long time.

Now look at your betta. Its home is far away, in Thailand. It lives in warm, still, shallow water full of plants. There is not much air in water like that. So the betta learned a trick. It comes up to the top and takes a gulp of real air. That is why a betta tank needs a lid. A betta must be able to reach the top.

Your zebra danio comes from streams in India. Those streams move fast and they are cooler. That is why danios never stop darting about. They are built for moving water.

Here is the big idea. Each fish fits its own home. One fish comes from a cool fast stream. Another comes from a warm still pond. They want different things. You cannot make one tank that is right for both.

So before you buy a fish, ask one question. Where does it come from? Then find that place on a map, and read about the water there. That is how you learn what your fish wants.

Do not tap on the glass. You have heard that before. But do you know why?

Most people will tell you that tapping hurts a fish, or makes it deaf. We looked for proof of that. We could not find any.

Here is what we did find. Nobody has ever measured what a tap on the glass sounds like inside a tank. Not one study. We also read the list of every article in a fish plant magazine going back to 1985. There are more than a thousand articles in it. Not one is about tapping the glass.

So that is odd. Everyone says it, and nobody has checked it.

But here is what we do know. Many tank fish hear very well. Tetras and danios have tiny bones inside them. Those bones carry sound to the ear. You have bones like that in your own ear. And a glass tank is a hard box. Sound bounces around inside it in strange ways.

We also know that a sudden noise makes a fish jump. That is real, and scientists measure it all the time.

So this is the honest answer. Tapping probably does not hurt your fish. Tapping does scare your fish.

And there is a better way anyway. Stand still. Do not move at all. Tapping makes fish swim away from you. Standing still makes them come closer. If you want a good look, still hands work and tapping does not.

One more thing, and it is the most useful thing on this page. Some things get said by everyone, and checked by no one. When you find one of those, you have found a real question. Checking it is what science is.

One day a fish will die. It is sad, and it happens to everyone who keeps fish.

Dead means the fish has stopped. Its body does not work any more. It will not get better. It will not wake up. It will not come back.

It is right to feel sad. You looked after that fish. You fed it. You drew it. Being sad means it mattered to you. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Some fish die because we made a mistake. Some fish die and nobody knows why. Both of these happen.

Here is a job you can do. Look at your book of drawings. Find your fish in it. You wrote down weeks of its life. Not many people do that for a fish.

Then, when you are ready, there is one more job. Test the water. Look at your other fish. Ask a grown up what we can learn. This will not bring your fish back. But it may help the next one.