Methods of Fish Disease Prevention

If you can provide your fish with optimal environmental conditions and adequate nutrition your disease outbreaks will likely be minimal. Maintaining health with preventive medicine has always been more successful than treating infectious diseases with drugs. To use an old adage and ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Providing your fishes with an optimum environment however are not an easy task and involves a basic understanding of a diverse group of principles. Not only must you maintain proper water quality parameters but also you need to avoid the introduction of toxins and bacteria organisms. Stress should be avoided and this involves a multitude of factors such as stocking your tank only with compatible species and providing your fishes with proper nutrition.

Providing your fishes with an optimal environment requires monitoring water chemistries and making corrective changes when they are indicated. Aquarium instruments and kits are available for checking pH, salt content, temperature, ammonia and nitrate levels, dissolved oxygen, and a variety of other factors. Whether or not you need to monitor all these parameters depends on your experience and particular aquarium situation. To minimize the likelihood of toxic effects from metabolic waste byproducts, the tank must not be overcrowded. The amount of animal life an aquarium can safely hold is its carrying capacity. The carrying capacity of marine tanks is considerably less than that of freshwater aquariums. Tank size is not the only factor to consider in determining carrying capacity. You must also consider such things as the turnover rate, the cubic filter bed space, the grain size of the filter medium, the territoriality of the fish species, and the amount of food you put in the tank.

Because of the highly diverse environment in which they inhabit fishes and particularly marine fishes have developed many evolutionary changes to favor survival. To avoid direct competition, many marine fishes have developed a very specialized mode of life. By occupying a specific ecological niche these fishes can often avoid direct competition with other specialized fishes. These specific ecological niches of marine life are energized by a variety of types of food. There are carnivorous, herbivorous, and omnivorous fishes; there are fishes that filter plankton, fishes that feed on algae, and fishes that are voracious predators. Knowledge of the dietary requirements of many fish species is based on observations of their eating habits in the wild, examination of the wild fishes stomach contents and using an experimental approach to feeding the species in captivity. By these means various dietary formations have been developed by a number of commercial firms. However you should be suspicious of any prepared food which claims to provide all your fishes with 100% adequate nutrition.

Citation

a) The Fascinating Freshwater Fish Book: How to Catch, Keep, and Observe Your Own Native Fish by John R. Quinn p.38-42