Making A Salt Water Aquarium

The scientific method for determining the exact number of fish involves using calculations that take the oxygen carrying-capacity factor into consideration, providing a total "biomass" or weight of all the fish that can safely be kept in one tank. This weight measurement is called the "carrying capacity."

In some public aquariums, fish farms, and aquaculture facilities, a sampling of fish are actually weighed before they are introduced to a system to prevent over-crowded conditions. It is impossible to do this for the average home aquarium.

The plenum method was discovered by Dr. Jean Jaubert and is often referred to as the Jaubert System. "Plenum" refers to an un-oxygenated layer of water trapped beneath a deep layer of gravel or sand at the bottom of an aquarium. This layer of water becomes anaerobic. Bacteria cultivate in this oxygen-free environment and remove nitrates from the aquarium. There are several variations of the plenum, depending on what literature you read.

The basic structure of the plenum system is essentially a deep (3" to 4") layer of gravel, suspended 1/2" to 1" above the bottom of an aquarium. It is usually recommended that very little

As such, they can be made smaller to handle the same bio-load, and are indeed space saving. As submerged media, however, they are wholly dependant on the flow of water to bring food and oxygen to them. In some ways, they compete with livestock (for oxygen) and can contribute deleteriously to water quality if overfed (fast nitrate accumulation). In the event of a power or system failure, this submerged media is vulnerable as it settles and suffocates its tremendous colony of aerobic bacteria. At

Please see Figure 1 for a detailed overview of nitrogen cycling.

For marine aquarium keeping the picture is much simpler (Figure 2). Protein Nitrogen enters into the system mainly as livestock and food. Eaten and not most of this material is broken down/converted to (

However, we have found that not all members of a given Family or Genus are equally hardy. For example, while many species of Pseudochromis have proven themselves as "cycleable" species, we have not had success with Pseudochromis dilectus, and several other Pseudochromis species. There are also many fish

Cleaning Under Your UGF
If you've ever considered tearing down your under gravel filter, just to clean the junk out from under the plate, here is a tip you'll enoy. ....

Fish on a plane
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060822_venomous_fish.html.