Fish Balancing

I have noticed that many people leave the hobby of fish keeping pre-maturely, because they complain that fishes die very easily, water gets fouled and they have to do complete over-haul and water changes with the cleaning of the entire tank every week. 

Now, if I over-haul the entire tank and make 100% water change every week, then this is tedious and also fishes are bound to die.

The basic reason for the fish death is that there are in-compatible species those have been kept together. Over feeding and fish death are the reasons for fouled water.

I started studying the new-comers tanks, I found that there are two sides to this problem, one people are not aware when buying fishes from store whether they are compatible with the fishes he already has back at home (I have published a compatibility chart earlier) and also while buying fishes they do not consider fish balancing.

Fish balancing is a tool which will help you to control any overfeeding to a certain extent.

The knowledge of where the fishes feeds is very important for fish balancing. I divide the fishes into following categories:

1. Surface Feeders – Feeding from the surface anything that is floating
2. Middle Feeders – Feeding on anything that is falling or floating or swimming in mid-waters.
3. Bottom Feeders - Feeding from the bottom anything that has fallen on the substrate, or they may also dig below the substrate to find food.
4. Scrapers – Feeding from the tank walls, rock surfaces by scraping, they also feed from the bottom.

First is whenever we buy fish from the store we must consider not their present size but the size they can grow to if given proper environment. Considering this we must also consider the volume of the aquarium we will put them in and the number of such fish that can go into that tank. Tank water volume must be measured considering the amount of substrate that is placed.

Now let us take an example from freshwater:

Suppose I want to keep Angels. Considering the size of my aquarium I can keep, say, suppose 5 Angels.

First is the Tank setup. For Angels we need to have a planted aquaria with long reed like plants like valisneria sp. at the background, like amazon sword plant in the  foreground, you can add other plants also. If you buy plants from the store or you collect it from the wild then there are possibilities that they will carry snails with them. These are the plant eating snails and they are prolific breeders and once had destroyed one of my planted 30 G tank within 15 days. So we need to control their population. The best biological control are the Botias. YoYo Loaches are the cheapest and best controllers of these snails, and if you are considering to spend some more money you can keep clown loaches or any other Botias.

They will eat all the snails and will keep the tank snail free. I once had YoYo in one of my tanks with large golden apple snails. Due to the size YoYo were no threat to Golden Apples, however in course of time they laid eggs. As snails are born very small, they were a perfect food for the YoYos’ and I lost almost 50% of the hatch.

Back to the point, Botias are really helpful however they will reduce the number of angels you can keep. So say now that I have taken 2 Botias so I reduce the angel number by 1. So we can now keep only 4 angels.

Now considering that you want a planted aquarium and your tank gets some amount of sunlight in any time of the day, it is likely that algae will grow in your tank walls and they are a complete nuisance. To eradicate algae and having a continuous house-keeping done for your glass walls and plants, Plecos or any sucker mouth catfishes are the best. Believe me I do not clean my tank walls any day, they do it for me. But they will again eatup your angel numbers. So say now that I have taken 1 Suckermouth catfish (they grow very large, though the size is directly proportional to the size of your tank), so I reduce the angel number by 1 again.

So my angel numbers are reduced to 3.

Botias and Suckermouth catfish will also help by eating up any uneaten food that floats to the bottom.

There is another important thing to consider. Whether you will be giving floating food, or the food that sticks to the glass wall, or the food that sinks to the bottom, such as live food. It is important because angels are middle feeders, so they will only take feed on the middle layers, so if there is any uneaten food that is floating the surface feeders will pick it up.

Now if consider 2 surface feeders such as mollies or guppies, then it will again reduce the number of angels by 1. So now my angel numbers are reduced to 2.

However the entire population of the Tank looks like this

2 Angels

2 Botia

1 Suckermouth catfish

2 mollies

We actually ended up in stocking the tank with more fishes, however there will be no competition for food, and neither there will be any food that will remain uneaten and decay in the tank. The basic or the first problem which anyone faces, who is new to the hobby is overfeeding. This layering of fishes will help to reduce overfeeding largely, helping to remove any uneaten food that may have decayed earlier, increasing the nitrate, nitrite and ammonia levels dangerously. Thumb Rule: Feed only the amount you think is good for the middle-feeders (in this case 2 Angels), and rest assured that everyone will have its share.