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What is an Aquarium?
So what is an Aquarium?
The aquarium is a vivarium of any size (from large aquarium to pond and small fish tank kept in household) in which water-dwelling animals and/or plants are kept/displayed. 
The best known classifications of Aquarium are Saltwater tank and Freshwater tank.
For the saltwater (marine) aquarium, anemone, coral and saltwater fish such as clown fish will be kept while freshwater aquarium have water-dwelled plants and freshwater fish like goldfish for example.
The aquarium that have plants, corals, anemones growing energetically in a designed layout is truly beautiful and it is an art to express the nature in its enclosed environment.
Type of Aquarium
The aquarium can be classified as follows.
Water Quality
Freshwater Aquarium
This freshwater aquarium does not contain salt content like river and pond. In comparison with saltwater, freshwater can be prepared from the tap water removing chlorine in Australia.
Also, there are widely available in significant quantities and hence possible to gather items with the fairly low cost.
Freshwater aquarium also offers the varieties of plants that can be grown in the aquarium and in fact, different shapes and colours within the designed layout stands out no doubt.
Saltwater Aquarium
Unlike freshwater aquarium, saltwater aquarium contains the salt content like marine and blackish water.
It is noticeable that the marine fish are much brighter and vivid in their colour and patterns than that of freshwater fish. Therefore, if the fish will be the core of your aquarium, marine fish is the go.
However, having said that, controlling the water quality, adjusting salinity, strong enough lighting for growing corals requires fair bit of investments.
This is why saltwater aquarium is said to be harder to keep than freshwater aquarium in general.
Intention
Focused onto water dwell animals
This type of aquarium is focused on the tropical fish and goldfish.
Goldfish and other cichlids can tear the live plants so in case that they are not compatible with each others, this would be the situation. As for the sizes of fish, it can be divided into large fish and small fish aquariums.
Further dividing into
- Ornamental fish
- Crustacean (Shrimp)
Shrimp has many types and individual one has different patterns so that some hobbyist have aquariums just for shrimps.
Fuss free aquarium can be created if main theme of your aquarium is tough fish as there will be no cost for live plants and can tolerate changing water quality.
Live Plants Aquarium
This aquarium has varieties of live plants as its main theme whereas in many cases, tropical fish will be introduced as well.
One of major aquarium manufacturer (ADA) calls it as “nature aquarium”.
In order to grow live plants in this type of aquarium, not only to control water quality for live fish but for live plants to thrive in such environment as well.
Hence, it requires certain degree of knowledge/understanding of needs for your preferred fish and plants.
It is truely beautiful to see varieties of different colours and patterns of plants growing out in aquarium.
Hence, there are countless ways of layout to design and enjoy it.
This type of aquarium will depends upon its individual knowledge and sense.
Size
Large Aquarium
Most distributing standard 2ft aquarium is bench-marked so anything bigger may said to be large aquarium.
Large cichlids for example are better to be kept in bigger than standard 4ft aquarium.
Obviously, bigger the aquarium requires more investment.
Small Aquarium
Any aquarium smaller than standard 2ft aquarium is considered small aquarium.
Due to the improvement on technology and established method of how to keep allows to have them in small aquarium recently.
Even though it’s possible, keeping its condition is still harder than large aquarium as water amount is small and change faster.
Fighting fish also known as Betta can keep in a cup size as example of small aquarium.
Merit and Demerit of Aquarium
Merit
- Very eye-catchy and beautiful as interior accessory
- In comparison with dogs and cats, aquarium offers less time consuming to look after them
- Does not dirt house
- You can start by yourself and no necessarily requires help by someone else
- Budget can be as low as $10-15 to start whereas if you insist to have top notch quality, then no upper limit
Demerit
- Can be difficult to have long holidays
- if glass or acrylic aquarium crack or tear apart, house will get flooded.
if gigantic aquarium happens to burst inside house…yep nightmare for sure
Conclusion
Hopefully you should have a rough idea or answers to the question “What is an Aquarium” through this article.