I am noticing lots of tiny air bubbles running around the tank.Is this normal to a fresh water aquarium.

are you talking bubbles coming out of the gravel and shooting up? or specs of something swimming around?

No they are not coming out from the gravel and going straight up.They are tiny little bubbles swimming around

yes, that is the effect of the filtering pump.
the more rippled discharge point, the more tiny
bubbles circling around.

oh boy dude, when I saw something like that in my tank it turned out to be a parasite, and it turned into millions I had to nuke the tank. look at them with a magnifing glass. i took one and put it in a slide, heres what they look like under a microscope.

img6.imageshack.us/img6/5489/parasitea.jpg

these bubbles arent going to the surface at all though right? or eventually they goto the surface and pop?

first time to see like that. it looks like
tiny egg of mosquitoes before turning to larvae.

Can I do something to remove them? Are they harmless?

niksu wrote:


Whoa hold on now I said thats what happened to me, im not saying this is your case, check them with a magnifing glass, if they dont look exactly like an air bubble should look there not, the charecteristic of these guys is swim like there drunk in loops and grab onto each other and shoot down or up then break apart, but like i asked before are these acctually airbubble can u see them easily? u had to kinda try to find these, and do they eventually rise the surface and pop like a real air bubble?

also they started to appear after a sick Raphael catfish someone gave me died, there where no fish in there after him and after i discovered them so i dont know if they were what was killing that fish or what. But i didnt take the chance of putting a new fish in.

i haven't reach to that point using microscope.
but mosquito egg and or planaria eggs are not
harmful to the fishes. you can control them
by controlled feedings. overfeeding encourage
more of them.....

To see them you have to get a closer look to the water but I will switch off both of my cannister filters and my air pump to see if they go to the surface and vanish through the air.

PAUL wrote:


i looked at some photos online and they dont look very similar i think it was some kind of external parasite cause these things could actually swim around.