Welcome to Aquarium Business: Life In The Aquarium

If you are an experienced aquarist, then you probably already know that taking care of a freshwater aquarium can be quite a process. Things get easier in a properly cycled aquarium, but getting to that point for the new aquarist can be daunting, and downright confusing.

I would consider myself to be still fairly new to the hobby, even though I've kept fish before, and some for years. Until recently, I had always followed the default pet store advice to keeping fish, which has been "cycle" your tank for 24 hours or 3 days if you can, then use water conditioner, and there you have it, the ideal fish environment, right? Wrong. Oh so very wrong.

About a year and a half ago, after not having fish for over a decade, I bought my kids a pretty blue Betta, and a cute little 2.5 gallon tank for the kitchen counter. Betta are always boasted as good, hardy, starter fish not requiring much space as they come in those little tiny cups. A 2.5 gallon tank must be a dream for a Betta! We had our blue Betta, lovingly named Bluesie, for over a year and I thought to myself "Wow, we must have been doing a good job to have kept this fish alive for so long!". 

I can't be too hard on myself in my naiveté, after all, this is pretty much the mentality of every newbie aquarist because we aren't really told otherwise. The reality is that when a Betta is properly cared for, they can typically live three to five years, and one year is actually quite young! Any Betta keepers' group in social media circles will tell you that just because your fish is alive, doesn't mean that it's happy or healthy - and unfortunately, in our case, it wasn't until Bluesie swam over the "rainbow bridge" that I put (a lot) more research in to why fish die and how to properly keep them.

The intent of this blog is to share all of my fish keeping experiences with the world! Posting it on my own social media accounts probably only serves to alienate my fishless friends that have no interest in the many many posts I can and will make about keeping fish, so here we have it, AquariumBusiness.blogspot.com.