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Aquarium filtration is vital to an aquarium’s success. Your aquarium filtration system needs to be functioning properly to ensure that your fish remain healthy.

However, just what is aquarium filtration all about?

Most people think that filtration is just about sticking in some sort of machine inside the aquarium and cleaning it once every other week. This is not enough to guarantee the health of your fish.

Mechanical Filtration - This is what most of us see when we look at a typical aquarium: a mechanical pump that sucks water, screens it using some fine material or cloth to sift the water, and then releases that water back into the tank to aerate the water. Finer filter material is more effective but also gets clogged more quickly. So unless your fish tank’s problems are severe, you want a filter screen that is both efficient and permeable.

Mechanical aquarium filtration serves to filter out the solid particles like waste and grit from the water. This is definitely important to have in mind while evaluating how clean of your fish tank actually is. However, we have to look beyond what we can see and look at the invisible problems plaguing a typical fish tank aquarium.

Chemical Filtration - Water, especially water that comes from the tap, can contain a whole host of dissolved compounds. Over time, these compounds will build up since mechanical methods are unable to filter them, and these compounds may reach levels which are poisonous enough to kill your fish.

Chemical aquarium filtration involves using high-grade ‘granular activated carbon’ to absorb these dissolved compounds. Some materials when heated to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, will become void of gases. Water, especially water that comes from the tap, has certain compounds that get dissolved in it.

Unfortunately, these carbons won’t be around permanently: compounds will overwhelm them over time, and eventually you’ll want to get new ones. Some stores that sell supplies for aquaria will make the claim that the job can be done effectively with charcoal, but it is much more effective to use activated carbon for absorption of these compounds.

Biological Filtration - As your fish go about the business of living their day-to-day lives, the respiration and waste-production process will produce a certain substance: ammonia. The ammonia filtration system, which is often overlooked, will rid your tank of the ammonia which also comes from decaying matter, and can be poisonous to your fish if it builds up long enough.

Thus, biological chemical filtration is needed to break down this ammonia into a harmless substance called nitrate. A type of bacteria, Nitrosomonas, will first eat up this ammonia and turn it into nitrite. The nitrite is much too harmful to fish, and it also must be processed by Nitrobacter bacteria in order to produce the nitrate.

Without these bacteria, fish die very quickly, as many new pet owners have discovered. This is the reason that you should buy cheaper, low-risk test fish to ‘break in’ the aquarium for the mor expensive fish. We have to look beyond what we can see and look at the invisible problems plaguing a typical fish tank aquarium.

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