ARE YOU HARDCORE ENOUGH FOR BIOTOPES?
Been around the block a few times? Want to be at the top of the fishkeeping game? Biotopes are the way forward for you, my friend.
Been around the block a few times? Want to be at the top of the fishkeeping game? Biotopes are the way forward for you, my friend.
What are they?
Biotope aquaria are inevitable for anyone seeking to recreate nature. Of all the aquarium styles out there, they are perhaps the ‘purest’, seeking to emulate the wilderness most closely. Why? Maybe it’s compassion for the fish. Maybe it’s a desire to see the most natural behaviours and interactions. Who knows? Biotope aquarists just ‘do’. ‘Biotope’ is defined as a region of habitat with a particular ecological community. In layman’s terms, if you take a trip to a lake, that lake will comprise of several biotopes. One might be the rocky shoreline of the lake, and the intertwining organisms that live there — the algae on the stones, the insect larvae and crustaceans, and the young fish seeking refuge in the shallows are all a part of that biotope’s make up. Further out into the lake you might find a sandy region teeming with a single species of plant, inhabited by predatory pike, tiny Gammarus shrimps, or an army of Three-spined sticklebacks. That’s another biotope. You get the idea.
Recreating a biotope aquarium involves researching a specific habitat and seeking to mimic it.
Such an effort may be ‘loose’, or it may be stunning in its level of detail. ‘Loose’ biotopes fall in to a few camps, and are where most well-intentioned biotope fans begin their aquarium journey. There are three main types of these which, while looking like a biotope to the untrained eye, can be dismissed as not necessarily being ‘true’ biotopes. Species-only aquaria containing just one type of fish may or may not be ‘true’ biotopes. Often, such a tank is set up to cover one specific aspect of the fish’s home habitat. For example, a tank might be set up with especially hard water to cater to Soda lake cichlids, only to be decorated with substrate, plants and rockwork that the fish would never encounter in the wild.
Regional, or Geographic aquaria tend to encompass many different biotopes from a wide catchment.
For example, African Rift Valley tanks or Amazonian tanks may contain species that live hundreds of miles apart, with differing environmental requirements. Habitat, or Ecological aquaria (what I once coined a commmunitope) tend to focus on one dimension of a biotope and disregard geography altogether.
Here the emphasis is on some quality shared by the tank’s inhabitants — stained blackwater conditions for dwarf cichlids and tetras, perhaps, or powerful waterflow over large cobbles for a mix of loaches. Fish in these Habitat aquaria all share a love for the environment offered, but might all originate in different countries or even continents.
How to start?
It’s safe to say that for most biotope keepers the biotope found them, rather than the other way around. Biotopes are memetic, something we see that takes a hold of our imagination and refuses to let go. It could be a fish documentary by David Attenborough, or a photo in a fishkeeping magazine. For a rare few aquarists it has been something witnessed first-hand — snorkelling in an African lake or wading about in a South American oxbow.
You can approach biotopes in a couple of ways. You could go ‘fish first’ and find a species you adore. From there, it’s a simple case of walking back the cat to find out where it comes from and gathering the exact details of its habitat. Then you can create that.
Once you know the fish you want to work around, try to source the original description for it. Some are available online — go to Google Scholar, type in the scientific name and see what comes up, and you might get lucky. If not, don’t be afraid to ask the person who first described or redescribed the fish for help. Eschmeyer’s catalogue of fishes (www.calacademy.org/ scientists/projects/eschmeyerscatalog-of-fishes) is a great place to start to give you names of authors who have described fish, then it’s a bit of sleuthing from there.
Going ‘habitat first’ can sometimes be trickier, unless it’s a well-known biotope. Trying to recreate a tank from a photograph of an obscure Sulawesi stream that has been visited by humans once, ever, is going to be a momentous task. There are many websites devoted to our favourite biotopes. If you aren’t being too ambitious you can start with a trip to somewhere like Mongabay.com. From there you’ll get a lot of loose biotope descriptions, including fish and plant compatibilities, but note that if you use Mongabay as your sole resource, you’ll likely end up with something more akin to a Geographic aquarium and maybe not a true biotope. But it’s still a brilliant entry point.
Other awesome sites to try out include Seriously Fish (www.seriouslyfish.com) and the vast database that is Fishbase
(I tend to use www.fishbase.de).