Keeping Your Aquarium Fish Healthy

Having healthy fish starts with buying healthy fish from your Local fish shop (LFS), so selection of the correct LFS is important, look at the size of livestock as well as the quality of the staff.

Look at the saltwater aquarium tanks themselves look for signs of well maintained, avoid tanks that are cloudy, have decyaing plants,dirty tanks or signs of ill fish or worst dead fish in them, all these are signs of poorly cared fish and maybe it worht going to the next LFS.

If you have a newly set up aquariumand the intial stocking of fish is very improtant and basic rules and guidelines should be followed regarding whta is suitable, if you have an doubt please discuss with your LFS.

Now you have brought your healthy fish from the LFS the rest is upto you, generally marine fish should be placed directly into a saltwater quarantine tank, this is practiced so any fish that arrive with any diseases will not give it to all your other maine animals in your saltwater aquarium.

The next step to ensure healthy marine fish is good aquarium maintenance and care should be used to ensure your aquarium is maintained at the optium level for your fish.

While feeding your fish look out for signs and make sure all your fish are eating, swimming and generally look in good health. Check the marine fish for color, eyes,skin and fins as well there breathing much as you would when you are buying marine fish. Spotting something now could mean you have increased the chances of living due to early treatment.

If you do note any odd behaviour of anything, preform a water test to check the aquarium water quality as this can account for many diseases starting. Many odd behaviour can be fixed by imply just adjusting the aquarium water parameters.

Keeping fish healthy can be minimized by avoiding stress where posible, fish stress factors include tank mates, aquarium size, aquarium temperature and water parameters.

The fishes slime coat protects the fish from disease and will protect from bacteria and fungi, once the fish become stressed this coating is reduced and the fish are vunerable to disease.

The slim coat has three functons:

1. Protective coat towards diseases
2. Buffer in internal-external gas exchange (osmoregulation)
3. Helps reduce a loss of energy while swimming.

Therefore to maintain any heathly fish in your saltwater aquarium the rules are simple, maintain good water quality and a stress free environment.