Essential Water Management Tips to Keep Your Tropical Fish in Excellent Health

Water is an essential constituent of all life forms; to fishes, however, it is environmental as well as metabolic, the medium in which they live, just as we live in air. Like us, fishes pass water through their excretory and alimentary tracts; but they also 'breathe' it, using their gills (and sometimes other organs) to extract essential oxygen and discharge carbon dioxide. There is also an exchange of metabolic and environmental water by osmosis.

We become uncomfortable or ill if we drink polluted water, or if the air we breathe doesn't suit our individual preferences (usually what we are used to) or the general requirements of our species, it may be too hot, cold, still, windy, dry, or humid for our liking, too low in oxygen, or polluted with smoke or toxic gases. Air, however, has a fairly uniform chemical composition throughout the world, so someone from one part of our planet can survive in any other, though he or she may find the local climate unpleasant.

Water, by contrast, is highly variable in its chemistry: it can be fresh, brackish, or saline; hard or soft; acid or alkaline; rich or poor in oxygen; pure or polluted.

Unlike us, fishes are restricted in their distribution, we can go anywhere there is air, but not all bodies of water are accessible to all fishes, for reasons of geography (for example a sea fish cannot enter a land locked lake) and environmental unsuitability.

The latter is usually the end product of the former, geological activity isolates a body of water and its fauna; subsequently there is a gradual modification of water parameters (chemistry, temperature, quality) paralleled by adaptation of the fishes to the changing conditions. Their systems, thus specialized, are then often unable to cope with any subsequent change. They may suffer discomfort or poor health, or even die, if the water in which they find themselves, which they 'drink' and 'breathe' and which interacts with their body fluids, does not meet their specific requirements, especially if the change is abrupt.