Leonhard Baldner, who wrote Vogel-, Fisch- und Tierbuch (Bird, Fish, and Animal Book) in 1666, maintained weather loaches and newts. In 1369, the Hongwu Emperor of China established a porcelain company that produced large porcelain tubs for maintaining goldfish over time, people produced tubs that approached the shape of modern fish bowls. History and popularization Cat and fishbowl, after Isoda Koryusai. Specialized equipment maintains appropriate water quality and other characteristics suitable for the aquarium's residents.

Size can range from a small glass bowl, a few liters in volume, to immense public aquaria of thousands of liters. Cuboid aquaria are also known as fish tanks or simply tanks, while bowl-shaped aquaria are also known as fish bowls. Many aquarium tanks also have plants.Īn aquarist owns fish or maintains an aquarium, typically constructed of glass or high-strength acrylic. A large aquarium may have otters, dolphins, sharks, penguins, seals, and whales. Public aquariums keep fish and other aquatic animals in large tanks. There are large public aquariums in many cities.

Small aquariums are kept in the home by hobbyists. The aquarium craze was launched in early Victorian England by Gosse, who created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo in 1853, and published the first manual, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea in 1854. The aquarium principle was fully developed in 1850 by the chemist Robert Warington, who explained that plants added to water in a container would give off enough oxygen to support animals, so long as the numbers of animals did not grow too large. The term aquarium, coined by English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, combines the Latin root aqua, meaning 'water', with the suffix -arium, meaning 'a place for relating to'. Fishkeepers use aquaria to keep fish, invertebrates, amphibians, aquatic reptiles, such as turtles, and aquatic plants. The underwater tunnel in the London aquarium A freshwater aquarium with plants and various tropical fishĪn aquarium ( PL: aquariums or aquaria) is a vivarium of any size having at least one transparent side in which aquatic plants or animals are kept and displayed. ( July 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unreliable citations may be challenged or deleted. Please help this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable.

Modern fish tank aquarium