Aquarium Water Research for Fish Enthusiasts
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The history of people keeping fish in aquariums has been over 4000 years, which can be traced back to the ancient China in royal families. Just like other pet animals, those people kept fish as a hobby or for ornamentation purposes. Experiences passed down from one generation to another with regard to the fish keeping techniques, such as when to change water and how to keep fish healthy. A business of raising fish in large scale was derived from it, as fish became a food and was found nutritious and delicious. This is called aquaculture. Aquaculture and ornamental fish keeping mainly differ in two aspects: (1) Fish health and welfare are not that much cared by the fish farmer compared to the fish enthusiasts maintaining their aquariums at home; and (2) Fish farmers care most about the payback - the time required to recover the cost of investment by fish production, while the fish enthusiasts do not have such a concern. However, they do have one belief in common: the water quality needs to good. Water for fish is just like the air for human. Poisonous air can kill a human, and poisonous water can kill a fish. As science and technologies greatly advanced since the 20th century, people have spent a significant amount of efforts investigating the health and welfare of human - for sure this is of the most importance because we are the humans. However, less efforts have been spent on fish health and welfare and there are a lot of questions remain unknown. For example, what water is considered as poisonous for fish? For humans, we have investigated thousands of water quality parameters and defined the threshold values above which are considered poisonous. Do we have such threshold values for fish keeping in aquariums and aquaculture? For humans, we know we could be sick under certain atmospheric conditions such as breathing in carbon monoxide, pm2.5, organic chemical vapors, and so on and we understand the mechanisms how they affect our body. For fish, do we know if fish shows symptoms of side swimming (fish swims tilted on its side), rapid swim velocity and deformities, what are the correlated water quality parameters? For humans, we know we have medicines to treat our illness and have environmental engineers to maintain our living environment. For fish, do we have medicines to treat fish illness and have experts to design water treatment systems to maintain a healthy water environment for aquariums and aquaculture? The answers to the latter questions regarding fish are generally no. Due to this huge research gap, I have started developing a line of research from perspectives of an environmental engineer on investigating how water quality parameters are changed as aquarium water ages and what could be the water treatment technologies that can be applied to aquariums and aquaculture to achieve a goal of balancing treatment effectiveness, water footprint, and economic savings. My first manuscript on this topic will be submitted for journal publication soon.
Published from: Pennsylvania US