Articles | Styles of Aquarium

Many creative styles have been made for aquariums, and the varieties can almost be as limitless as one's imagination. Fish aquarium tanks have been made into the shapes of sinks, coffee tables, and even toilet bowls. There has even been an aquarium made in the shape of an Apple computer, which was fondly named MacQuarium. Such custom-made aquariums can and do cost up to more than a hundred thousand dollars. They have turned into status symbols of the upper class.

Fish aquarium tanks can be as small as a simple glass bowl containing less than a pint of water, or they can be large public enclosures that are able to sustain entire aquatic ecosystems like kelp forests. Simple fish bowls that have no filters or any other similar mechanisms are now generally considered unfit for keeping most species of fish. Advanced aquarium and fish keeping technology have deemed this to be so, with suitable fish aquarium tanks having at least three kinds of filtration: chemical, mechanical and biological.

As an example , delicate and fragile animals like jellyfish can be kept in aquariums that have been designed with circular shapes. One such tank is the kreisel tank. It is designed to have circular and slow flowing water with the barest of hardware inside the tank. Kreisel is a German word meaning spinning top. A kreisel aquarium does not have any sharp corners, pumps or other aquarium hardware inside it, in order to prevent injury to the animals. The gentle flow of the water inside the tank keeps the animals suspended, and the area where water is pumped out of the tank has a delicate screen cover to avoid the animals from being stuck.

There are several types of kreisel tanks. A real kreisel has a circular lid that is submerged. A pseudokreisel has the surface of its bottom curved, while the top surface is flat. This gives it a semicircular or U shape. Langmuir or stretch kreisel tanks have a double-gyred design, in which the length of the tank is at least double its height. Both sides of the aquarium have one down-welling inlet each, which allows gravity to produce double gyres. An optional down-welling inlet at the middle is also sometimes present.

A stretch kreisel may have a lidded or open top. Screens can be placed midway down its sides or on the top sides. Stretch kreisel designs also have combinations of these features. For example, a circular tank without a lid lets the water surface contribute to the circular flow. Such kreisel tank designs let households easily keep jellyfishes just as they would regular fish.

Biotope aquaria are also a type of aquarium that is quite popular. Biotope aquaria simulate specific natural environments, examples of which include Lake Victoria or the Amazon River. Their elements such as the plants, fish, wood, rocks, and substrate match the particular environment that they are mimicking. Biotope aquaria are quite difficult to successfully set up , and these will often have just one or a few species of fish and other invertebrate animals.