What do I do next?

[Pugwinkle]

I purchased my first fish last weekend. I bought a male betta fish and I have him in a 2 gallon hexagon plastic tank I got at Petcetra. It has a pump and light but no heater. I have several questions.

So far he has been doing very well. He enjoys his daily meals and swims around happily.

I am wondering what I do next? When do I have to change his water (it still looks as clean as it did on Saturday)? How do I go about cleaning the tank?? Do I put him in another container and take the whole thing apart to clean it including the gravel on the bottom? How often does this need to be done?

 

[OrionGirl]

The 'dirty' parts of the water aren't always visible. Water tests for ammonia, nitrites and nitrates are important. If you don't get a kit of your own, you should still take a water sample from the tank to your LFS and have it tested.

To do a water change--you'll want a siphon tube. They are fairly cheap, and invaluable in changing water. You run the siphon through the gravel to remove the solid wastes (and you'll be shocked how much there is), and this also removes some of the water. You'll then replace that amount of water with clean, dechlorinated water. Since the tank is still cycling, get the new water close to the temp of the water in the tank to reduce stress on the fish.

 

[tomm10]

I would add that you don't want to take the whole tank apart and clean it. This will kill off any nitritfying bacteria in the tank. To get a better understanding of thes bacteria do a search for nitrifying bacteria or cycling on this forum.

 

[snakeskinner]

My family made this mistake when I was younger and led to the idea of how much work aquariums are. We had 10 gallon setups several times while I was growing up. Our version of maintenance included feeding the fish we had bought which were never compatible and I'm sure too many at one time. when the tank got visibly dirty (probably a month or so) we'd take some of the water and pour it into bowls and put the fish in them. then we hauled the tank outside and washed out everything with the gardenhose. We always used the cheap UGF that came with the kit at wal-mart. Within a short time the fish either all died or my parents got tired of cleaning out the tank and we'd give the fish away. I was given a 55 gallon about 5 or 6 years ago that was used for a reptile. I decided to read up on aquarium keeping and found out how wrong we were at keeping up the tank. I set this tank up last year and have since added a 36 gallon and two 10 gallons and it takes less work combined than our old 10 gallon setup. Up until a month ago, I kept a betta in a 1-gallon tank with UGF. I have a python aquarium vacuum that makes the work much much easier. I highly recommend one of these or something similar to clean out a tank but with your tank being so small, you may just be able to dump some of the water out into the sink and add some tapwater back to it. I'm lucky enough to have chlorine/chloramine free tapwater but if your water has any of this you'll have to use remover on it first before adding to the tank. Kyle