Oxygen is important to all life forms, and in a restricted volume, like the aquarium, it is much more important to make sure that you will find sufficient plants to maintain your fish in comfort and ease. Unless you do something, the fish can’t do anything to assist themselves.
Plants are the regular oxygenators, and beneath appropriate conditions supply all that’s essential, but with overcrowded tanks it is essential to aerate artificially. This also assists whenever you are breeding certain kinds of fish, and also you can do it by installing a little air pump, electrically operated, which is fairly inexpensive to purchase. A little tube is carried from the pump to the bottom of the tank, and also the finish inserted into a porous stone, which diffuses the air into a thin stream of bubbles. One pump can, in reality, be utilized to serve a number of tanks.
Artificial aeration is especially useful at evening when the plants fail to give off oxygen, and give off carbon dioxide instead. The bubbles forced into the tank do- not really became dissolved in the water themselves, though a few of the air does, but the majority of oxygen comes from the surface of the water, which is circulated by the rising column of bubbles. It should be remembered that, as there is a limit to the quantity of oxygen the water can hold, the higher the surface region the much better.
It is not advisable to aerate continuously in this manner as the fish will turn out to be dependent upon it, and find some discomfort when moved to a tank with static water.
Warm water holds much less oxygen than cold. Whilst water at a temperature of 50°F holds 7-8 components per 1,000 by vol., water at 90°F holds only five components. This shows how rapidly the oxygen content material decreases as the temperature increases.