The Importance of Beneficial Bacteria in Your Fish Tanks

Beneficial bacteria is very important when it comes to saltwater and freshwater fish tanks. Without any beneficial bacteria, your fish will get sick time after time again. The beneficial bacteria will protect your fish against certain illnesses. If you do not have any beneficial bacteria you will run into nothing but problem after problem with your fish tank. When you set up a saltwater of freshwater tank there is a certain numbers of days you must wait until the tank is established. By established, I mean that the nitrate and ammonia levels are down to what they should be at. Beneficial bacteria helps to keep these numbers where they need to be as well.

One way to keep your beneficial bacteria is to leave the cartridges in your filter alone. I don't mean the regular cartridges but the bio wheel cartridges. These look like little wheels which spin on your filter system. These are the main housing unit of beneficial bacteria. Never rinse the cartridges off ever. You will want to throw away old filter cartridges that contain carbon in your filter system. When you clean your filter system, fill up the sink with the used water from the fish tank. Fresh water kills the whole beneficial bacteria colony.

You will never want to clean all of your rock at one time. Doing this will clean all of the beneficial bacteria out of the fish tank. You always want to clean only one half of the rock. I used to clean my tanks to the point where there was no beneficial bacteria in my fish tanks. I would clean the filter, decorations and rock with clean water. Then my fish would get sick time after time and I couldn't figure out the reason for them becoming so sick all of the time. You will want to leave the decorations in the tank and scrub them with a toothbrush.

As long as you leave half of the substrate alone you will not have a problem with your beneficial bacteria colony. You will not have to worry about your fish getting sick as much as they usually would. You simply clean the filter with used water from your fish tank and leave the decorations in tank and scrub them with a toothbrush when needed. If you rinse off the decorations with regular tap water you will kill off the beneficial bacteria which is living on your decorations.