Fish Jump

Now I know I’ve covered the importance of covers over fish tanks before but I’ll mention it again.
It is very important to have a cover over your fish tank for several reasons.
1-to keep the sun from causing algae problems in your fish tank
(now you don’t need to completely black out the tank, the fish need to be able to tell night from day and there needs to be some air exchange over the tank but most fish don’t need direct sunlight to be happy/healthy.)

2-to keep debris, leaves, sticks, small animals, and children out of your fish tank. Leaves and stuff tends to block plumbing so plenty of reason not to have them falling into your fish tank and it is probably fairly self explanatory why you might not want ducks or dogs or cats and especially children treating your fish tank as a play pool even if there wasn’t a liability issue.

3-to keep the fish inside the tank. Now if you have a really deep tank and don’t fill it too high then few fish are likely to jump out if there is more than 12 inches of free board above the water line but some fish might still surprise you. However, many tanks may not have that kind of extra depth to ensure the fish stay in. I’ve run some tanks with very little tank rim above the water line and for those tanks, you definitely need a cover to keep your fish down. And even with a cover it is possible that some fish will still manage to jump out. This is what happened in my 300 gallon system the other night. Even with a cover on, a couple of fish must have been getting chased and they managed to jump and bump out between the cover and rim of the tank.

One Jumper

Other jumper