Decorating your aquarium is the fun part of fish keeping!
Once you’ve done your due diligence and picked out your tank and accessories, selected the perfect spot and started cycling your tank, you can start to decorate! Just pick the perfect background and accessories and get creative.
Decorating your aquarium with an underwater scene can be really cute, or you could go with something that matches your room or a favorite theme.
Aquarium décor can be purchased online quite easily as can aquarium plants and backgrounds. Some people like to use vintage decorations and others like the more modern from the treasure chest that opens every so often with an air bubble to the scuba diver that is 2 magnetic pieces – one inside the tank and the other outside so it looks like he is swimming through the tank.
One thing to remember when decorating your aquarium is to think about your fish first. Fish need places to hide out and interesting outcropping to swim around just like in the wild. Depending on how many fish you have you will want to make sure that there will be little hiding spots for every fish and the weakest doesn’t get left out in the open all the time. Be careful not to overfill the aquarium with decorations, though or your fish may be hidden all the time and you may never see them!
Before decorating our aquarium make sure you rinse off anything that will go in the water. You can use almost any waterproof item as long as it is non toxic and won’t deteriorate once it is submerged. Don’t use chemicals to clean the decorations – just rinse in warm water to remove anything that might be on the surface. If you are decorating with live plants, make sure you anchor them properly in the substrate so that you don’t wake up the next day and find them floating around.
Also be sure to place your decorations so that you can still easily perform aquarium maintenance such as vacuuming the gravel and scraping algae – remember every new surface you put in there could become a potential home for algae that you will have to scrape off!