Aquarium

• 1. Introduction

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  An aquarium is a vivarium with at least one transparent side, holding water in which aquatic plants or animals are kept and displayed. The word itself was coined by the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse. He joined a Latin root meaning water with a suffix meaning a place for. Behind that tidy invention sits a stranger lineage. A Chinese emperor making goldfish tubs. A French biologist proving how a sea creature builds its shell. A chemist who worked out, with a thirteen gallon container of goldfish and snails, why any of this works at all. How did a glass box of water become the second most popular hobby in America? Why does the death of a single fish matter more in a small tank than a large one? And what does it take to keep an enclosed slice of ocean alive on a living room shelf?

• 2. Forgotten Origins

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  In 1369, the Hongwu Emperor of China founded a porcelain company that produced large tubs for keeping goldfish. Over time, those vessels drifted closer in shape to the modern fish bowl. The impulse to hold water life in a container is far older than the English word for it. Leonhard Baldner wrote Vogel-, Fisch- und Tierbuch in 1666, a bird, fish, and animal book, and he kept weather loaches and newts alive himself. A persistent legend claims the Romans invented the aquarium, said to have kept sea barbels in marble-and-glass tanks. Scholars doubt that story holds up. The line between curiosity and true experiment was crossed in 1832, when Jeanne Villepreux-Power, a pioneering French marine biologist, became the first person to build aquaria for experimenting with aquatic organisms. Her tanks delivered the first direct evidence that argonauts, a marine cephalopod, make their own shells.

• 3. The Victorian Craze

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  In 1850, the English chemist Robert Warington published in the Chemical Society's journal the principle that makes the whole hobby possible. Plants placed in a container of water give off enough oxygen to support animals, so long as the number of animals does not grow too large. He had tested it with a thirteen gallon container holding goldfish, eelgrass, and snails, one of the first stable aquaria. Others were circling the same idea in those years. In 1836, soon after inventing the Wardian case, Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward proposed using his tanks for tropical animals, and by 1841 he did, at first only with aquatic plants and toy fish. In 1846, Anne Thynne kept stony corals and seaweed alive for almost three years in London, credited as the creator of the first balanced marine aquarium. The public obsession ignited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where ornate aquaria in cast-iron frames drew crowds in the United Kingdom. In 1853, Philip Henry Gosse launched the craze in earnest, earning the title Father of the Aquarium. He created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, a display first known as the Fish House. People also called it the Vivarium, the Aquavivarium, and the Marine vivarium, before all of those names yielded to the single word aquarium. Gosse used that word as the title of his 1854 book, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Water, which dwelt mostly on saltwater tanks. The high-water mark of the British craze ran from 1853 to 1860.

• 4. Spreading The Hobby

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  Edward Edwards patented a dark-water-chamber slope-back tank in 1858, with water circulating slowly to a reservoir beneath it, refining how glass-fronted tanks held their quality. Warington had developed those early maintenance techniques, cooperating with Gosse until a critical review of the tank water composition split them. Across the Channel, the German Emil Adolf Rossmaessler pushed the aquarium as a tool for education. He wrote about it in an 1855 article in Die Gartenlaube, The Gazebo, and in his 1857 book Das Susswasser-Aquarium, The Freshwater Aquarium, freshwater being far easier to keep alive in landlocked places. In 1862, William Alford Lloyd, bankrupted by the collapse of the English craze, moved to Hamburg to oversee the circulating system and tanks at the Hamburg Aquarium. The United States caught the same fever. Henry D. Butler's The Family Aquarium, published in 1858, was one of the first American books written solely about the aquarium. That same year, The North American Review reported that William Stimson may have owned some of the first functional aquaria, as many as seven or eight. Henry Bishop, a Baltimore bird and fish dealer known as the Goldfish King, is credited with transforming the American aquarium trade, selling tanks and supplies from the 1870s and 1880s. The first aquarist society in the United States was founded in New York City in 1893. The New York Aquarium Journal, first published in October 1876, is considered the world's first aquarium magazine.

• 5. Electricity And Glass

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  Around 1908, the first mechanical aquarium air pump was invented, driven by running water rather than electricity. Several historians of the hobby treat that air pump as a pivotal moment in its development. The real surge came when homes gained an electricity supply after World War I, which made artificial lighting, aeration, filtration, and water heating possible at last. Early amateurs kept native fish, with the exception of goldfish, until cheap access to exotic species changed everything. Fish were once imported in jugs of various materials, aerated with a bicycle foot pump. Plastic shipping bags arrived in the 1950s, and air freight eventually let fish travel from distant regions. Metal frames doomed marine tanks in the 1960s through corrosion, until tar and silicone sealant enabled the first all-glass aquaria, built by Martin Horowitz in Los Angeles. Frames stayed on for a while afterward, purely for looks. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the aquascaping designs of Takashi Amano led fishkeepers in Japan to treat home aquariums as compositions to be admired, not just cases for displaying fish.

• 6. Materials And Shapes

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  Today most aquaria are built from glass panes bonded with one hundred percent silicone sealant, with plastic frames on the upper and lower edges for decoration. Once silicone held a long-term watertight seal, the structural frame became unnecessary, and glass turned out to be cheaper and more scratch resistant than acrylic. Glass is standard up to about 1000 litres, though it is brittle, and usually the sealant fails before the pane does. Acrylic became available to the public in the 1970s and is now glass's main rival. Acrylic is generally stronger, lighter, and insulates against temperature better, which matters in colder climates where a tropical tank needs less from its heater. Scratches mark acrylic more easily than glass, but unlike glass, those scratches can be polished out. Larger or stranger builds reach for other materials entirely. Fiberglass-reinforced plastic is strong but not transparent. Reinforced concrete works where weight and space do not matter, so long as it is coated to stop the water and the concrete from attacking each other. Plywood offers lower cost, less weight, and better insulation, and is often sunk into a wall to hide it. The hobby has produced tanks from coffee tables, sinks, and even toilets, along with the Macquarium, made from the shell of an Apple Macintosh computer. Among people of means, according to The New York Times, a dazzling aquarium is one of the last surefire ways to impress their peers, with some custom home tanks costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 7. Specialized Tanks

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  A kreisel tank takes its name from the German word for spinning top or gyroscope, and it is shaped like a horizontal cylinder. It is designed for delicate animals such as jellyfish and newborn seahorses, giving them a slow circular flow with the barest minimum of interior hardware. The tank has no sharp angles and keeps its inhabitants away from plumbing, with water leaving through a screen that stops animals from being pulled into the pump. In a true kreisel, a circular tank has a circular submerged lid. Pseudokreisels are U or semicircle shaped and usually have no lid. Stretch kreisels use a double gyre design, where the tank is at least twice as long as it is tall, and two downwelling inlets let gravity spin two gyres at once. The biotope aquarium chases a different goal entirely. It recreates a specific natural environment, matching the fish, plants, substrate, rocks, wood, and coral to one real place. Popular choices include the Amazon River, the Rio Negro, the African rift lakes of Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika, and the coral reefs of Australia, the Red Sea, and the Caribbean Sea. A true biotope is hard to recreate, and most hold only a few species, sometimes just one.

• 8. Keeping It Alive

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  The death of the only fish in an 11 litre tank pushes the whole system out of balance, while the same death in a 400 litre tank with many other fish is only a minor change. That single contrast explains why hobbyists favor larger tanks, where a systemic shock is diluted and less attention is needed. Water itself weighs 1 kilogram per litre, and that weight, along with internal pressure, holds most home aquaria to around 1 cubic metre, a 1000 litre tank weighing 1000 kilograms. Public aquaria face no such ceiling. The Georgia Aquarium features an individual tank of 6,300,000 US gallons, large enough for sharks or beluga whales. At the heart of every healthy tank is the nitrogen cycle. Fish and other inhabitants excrete ammonia, which is toxic at high concentrations. Nitrifying bacteria of the genus Nitrosomonas capture that ammonia and turn it into nitrite, still toxic, and bacteria of the genus Nitrospira then convert nitrite into less harmful nitrate. Nitrobacter were once believed to do that second step, but they turn out to be absent in detectable levels in established aquaria, even though commercial jump-start kits often still contain them. New tanks lack enough of these bacteria, so keepers mature them through a fishless cycle, a silent cycle with fast-growing plants, or slow growth over six to eight weeks. As of 1996, aquarium keeping ranked as the second most popular hobby in the United States after stamp collecting, and in 1999 an estimated 9.6 million American households owned one. The reasons people keep them are not only aesthetic. Watching aquatic life has been linked to lower stress, lower blood pressure, better sleep, and even use in therapy for excited children and Alzheimer's patients.