Adding Gravel to Fish Tanks

"Okay, now we're going to start with setting our tank up. We can start with the selection of gravel. In your pet store you have a wide array of gravel types and colors. The gravel really is more for you. Fish don't really care what color the gravel is. Size wise, there's probably not too much for them to select about too. So it's really up to you. Reasons for gravel? It looks better in the tank. It also will hide fish waste matter. It also will serve to anchor plants, live or artificial. For anchoring the plants it's better. It does afford some biological filtration as long there's some amount of oxygen going through the gravel so that's another reason for having gravel but really it's up to you if you want to color coordinate it with your living room that's fine. I like to go natural, but you can go with these brighter colors here. That's really an individual preference. What we're going to do is we're going to open up this bag. It's fairly clean when you get it from the store. You can just open it up but we usually do recommend rinsing it once just because there might be some impurities there. You just never know. It only takes a second here. So I'm just going to open this bag of gravel and pour it in here. The other reason that fish like gravel; it gives them something to do. You'll often find fish poking around in the gravel. It just gives them something to do."