The purpose of decorating your aquarium with fish tank decorations is to create that wonderful theme that you can be proud of and show off to all your friends.
But when designing that ultimate theme, you will also need to take into account the safety and comfort of your fish as well.
Your theme or design should enhance the lives of the fish and should not in any way cause them distress.
If you are new to the hobby, it is not uncommon to be over excited when it comes to picking out fish tank accessories and placing them inside the aquarium.
You would want to have a design that looks complete according to the image you have in your mind.
If you are creating a Pirate theme for example, you would desire having everything that portrays the theme such as the pirate ship, loot, treasure chest, caves, skeletons and pirates.
But overdoing the decorations will jeopardize the fish.
How Does Over Decorating Affect The Fish? The most crucial problem that too much ornaments cause is that they would limit swim space.
Fish need space to swim.
The aquarium is a small confined tank of water that already does not provide sufficient swim space, no matter how big you think yours is.
Once you start packing the tank with figurines and sunken ships, the space gets even tinier and less comfortable.
Having too much decor will also reduce the volume of water that you have in there.
Too little water means that there is not enough of a buffer to contain pollutants and your water would need more frequent changing.
A lower volume of water would also make it more difficult to control the chemical balance as well as temperature.
The limited amount of swim space would be even graver for territorial fish such as Betta and Cichlids.
These would cause them to aggressively fight for territory and where there is a winner, there would always be an injured loser.
Finally, when swim space is low, fish have the tendency to scrape against the fish tank decorations and this can lead to injury and sores.
How To Limit The Aquarium Decor The key is to have sufficient accessories which will create your ideal theme but without jeopardizing the fish in any way.
The first type of aquarium decor any tank needs is a cave or hiding hole.
No matter what design you plan to end up with, there is always an ornament that you can use for this purpose.
These could be pirate caves, sunken ships, pagodas, temples, houses and more.
Hiding holes are a crucial part of any fish tank.
They provide your fish with a secluded place to escape when they feel stressed by too much human or fish attention.
When choosing your hiding hole, select one that will not take up too much room.
You should also inspect the gaps and openings, as well as how much room is there inside it.
This is to ensure that the fish that gets inside will be able to easily exit and not get trapped in there.
After selecting your cave, you can now decide if there is sufficient room for other figurines.
There is no fixed number of accessories that you can have.
You would have to play by eye, for this one.
As a general rule which I follow: Small aquariums should have only one fish tank decor.
This should be a suitable cave or hiding hole.
Nothing else.
Medium sized tanks can have one cave and one or two small figurines to accompany it.
Large tanks can have more based on the size of the tank.
As long as they are properly spaced out, creating little territorial boundaries, they should be fine.