Five External Stressors of Marine Aquarium Fish - Be aware that external vibrations can affect your aquarium and its inhabitantsMost marine aquarium hobbyists want to provide as naturalistic and stress-free an environment as possible for the fish and other livestock in their care, so they’re careful to maximize water quality, offer nutritious foods, promote compatibility among tankmates, aquascape appropriately, and so on. In other words, they put a lot of thought into what’s going on inside the aquarium. But what about what’s happening outside the tank? In some cases, very conscientiously maintained aquariums can still contain stressed-out fish because of various external influences that may not even occur to the hobbyist—especially if the tank houses species that are naturally skittish to begin with. Here are four of them off the top of my head: 1) Vibrations Try this little experiment: Stand on the opposite side of the room from your aquarium and shout, whistle, or clap your hands loudly while observing your fish. Next, stomp your foot on the floor, still keeping an eye on your piscine pets. Very likely, the shout, whistle, or clap had little to no effect on the behavior of your fish but the stomp sent them dashing for cover. The explanation for this is, higher-pitched sounds produced in the air don’t do a very good job of crossing the air/water interface and, therefore, will tend to go unnoticed by fish. On the other hand, low-frequency vibrations that travel along solid surfaces will definitely be transferred to the aquarium and felt by the fish.
Posted on: Sat, 10 May 2014 20:08:27 +0000
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