Making Your Fish Feel at Home With an Aquarium Background

You might not think to buy it when you're doing the big shop to set up your fish tank, but an aquarium background is well worth the money spent. It will give your fish one solid wall that does not have movement behind it, which makes your fish feel better, and it will cover all the wires and tubes that line the back of the fish tank, which will make your tank look much better. And if your tank looks better, you'll probably feel better. If you're going to go to all this work, after all, shouldn't the end result be pleasing to look at?

Let's start with the benefits to your fish. While it might not seem terribly important at first, it does matter if your fish are calm and feel like they have a place to hide if they need it. Calm fish get sick less, and calm fish are also much more fun to watch. Giving your fish one wall of the tank that is safe for them to be close does not necessarily mean they will hide in the back, though, so don't worry about that. They just need to know they can hide if they need to. Your fish probably do not care which background you choose, though. I doubt they understand the poster-sized photograph you put up to be the equivalent of having a window on a real underwater environment. They just know it kind of matches the rest of the tank, and there's no movement back there so it is a safe place to hide.

You probably will care what the background looks like. That's fine, because there are all kinds of attractive background images you can get for your fish tank. Many of the newer backgrounds (or "wallpapers" as some retailers refer to them as) are two-sided, so you actually get two aquarium backgrounds for the price of one. Usually one side is an oceanscape, better used for salt water aquariums, and the other side has a jungle or river look to it for freshwater aquariums, but sometimes you can find a good aquarium background that has two sides for whatever is appropriate for the kind of aquarium you've picked.

Generally, the simpler the image is, the better. Don't get too concerned about what is on the background image because you won't be seeing a whole lot of it. Ideally you will have some decorations in your aquarium that will take up quite a bit of space in front of the wallpaper, plus you'll have a little forest of plants, whether they are fake or real. And then, of course, you'll have your fish, which is what most of your attention is going to be focused on anyway. Really the aquarium background's main job is to block the view of all the plumbing that runs your tank. You don't need to be looking at all those wires and uptake tubes and other hardware -- you want to be looking at your fish. And even if you don't mind seeing all the uptake tubes and wires, the other members of your household will appreciate a neat-looking aquarium.

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