Very good effort. I like your diagrams. If you want me to pick some nits:
1. Most ammonia from fish is excreted from the gills. It does come out of their urine (up to 25%), and also from any organic substance that decomposes in the tank (poop, food), but most ammonia from the fish flows out of the gills.
Huh i did not know that! I always thought that the majority of ammonia came from the fishes excretions (as in poop & urine). I think i might keep the diagrams short and sweet though as i want them to be a easy to understand/user friendly as possible but i might add this info in a notes section
v .
2. You don't really distinguish between the bacteria that process ammonia and the bacteria that process nitrites. I think it is an important distinction since it creates two different cycling phases for your tank. The bacteria have different growth rates, and recommended tank temp and ph might vary based on which critter you are trying to encourage at a point in the cycle.
I think i might elaborate more on the cycling process but i'm not sure yet as there is already a wealth of indepth cycling topics explaining the more intricate processes of the nitrogen cycle which i might just put the links to on the post
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Thankyou very much
v ! An easy to understand/user friendly approach thread is just the sort of thing i was aiming for
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a very simple, but good explanation. We just need some newbs to try it on now...to see if they get it.
Does anyone think this should be pinned?
Its a great article
Thankyou very much
! There's a lot more i wanna add to this thread yet, probably going to be a lot of editing involved lol, but i'm hoping to eventually basically create an easy to understand/user friendly introduction to successful fishkeeping
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I was inspired to do this because;
a. I started to spend time recently on Yahoo! Answers in the fish keeping section after seeing a few fish keeping questions & problems on it. While there are some knowledgable members on there, the majority of people are not very knowledgable on fish keeping at all and large amounts of people seek help about fish problems everyday on there who know almost nothing about fish (and what they do know is just misinformation).
In only a few weeks i came across 6 people who thought a bubble pump/air stone was the filter in a tank, and plenty of people who had no filters in their tanks at all (but had lots of waste heavy fish like goldfish etc).
And there were loads of people that were completely misinformed or confused about cycling tanks (like lots of people thought that to cycle a tank you had to let it run without any fish for a few weeks before adding fish to it, not realising that you need an ammonia source in the tank to start the cycle and simply letting it run without any fish or ammonia source for weeks on end would do nothing to help start the cycle etc).
And this is not even getting on to the miriad of fish stocking problems have on there (saw tanks with crazy fish stocks like tiger barbs, goldfish & bumblebee gobys mixed together!)
I could understand all the confusion about the nitrogen cycle, but i was quite shocked that some people were confused over what exactly a filter is- in fact in real life i came across such a person who was keeping a comet goldfish in a 5 gallon and thought the bubble pump/air stone was a filter- i gave him one of my mature fish tank filters (felt sorry for his goldfish, am working on trying to convince him to get it a larger tank, though the fish has been visibly happier and a lot more active since he put my 50gallon filter in its little tank
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b. I myself found a lot of this very confusing when i first started out in fishkeeping. When i started using fish forums i was given a huge amount of help but i came across so much indepth information about water quality etc i often just found things even more confusing. It was difficult sometimes to get clear simple non-conflicting answers on a lot of things. It took a while before i started being able to sort the basic information that i really needed to know & understand from the more intricate details which were not so vital or relavant to my fish keeping situations.
I moved house late last year, moving from Somerset to Hampshire, and since moving to Southampton i have found myself amongst numerous new people who are thinking about getting into fish keeping and have a lot of questions about it. I started directing people to this forum (i do this a lot on Yahoo! Answers too), but there is such a wealth of information here i can understand some people finding it a quite daunting.
So i'm going to try and create these pictures to explain the essential basics in a user friendly easy to understand manner, which will hopefully help both people just getting into the hobby and also people who are a bit confused about certain aspects of fish keeping (like how i was for a long time lol!).
I'm not sure i'd call myself a fish keeping expert as i have no particularly specialist areas of knowledge when it comes to fish keeping, but i have picked up a great deal of information over the years on a diverse array of aspects of fishkeeping and so will do my best to help share it with others. These pictues will be largely based on both my personal fish keeping experience as well as the information i have learnt over the years over fish keeping (this will probably be a slowly updated thread though due to the length of time it takes to draw & organise the picture articles etc)
v .
and omg i just learn that FISH PEE?!?! thats soo cool lol its like the equivelant to peeing in a bath or something 
