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In our last article, we shed some light on ammonia and how it gallivants through your aquarium, wreaking havoc on your fish’s health. Now that your tank is cycled, any marauding ammonia molecules are immediately captured by an army of bacteria and sequestered away into less harmful compounds. But that’s not the end of the story! Did you know that ammonia has a mild-mannered alter ego? In freshwater aquariums, the majority of ammonia actually exists as its ionized form, ammonium. Ammonium (NH4+) differs from ammonia (NH3) in a few ways. While ammonia is a dissolved gas, ammonium is an ion,...

The chemistry part of fishkeeping can be intimidating! One moment you’re setting up a brand-new fish tank, and the next moment there are fish gasping at the surface, all your test kits are turning green, and everyone at the fish store is throwing words like “ammonia poisoning” and “nitrification” at you. What even is ammonia and why is it such a big deal, anyways? Hopefully, this article can provide a few tips on how to diagnose, eliminate, and prevent the buildup of ammonia—the big bad wolf of the hobby that constantly threatens to blow all of our glass and acrylic...