GWAPA – May 2007 Meeting

May 23rd, 2007

On Saturday, I attended GWAPA’s May meeting at Ghazanfar’s home in Virginia. Meetings at Ghazanfar’s house are always exciting because everyone wants to see the latest adjustments to the aquascape in his huge 215G tank built into his basement wall. As always, he never disappoints, showing us the beautiful aquascape you see below. It’s hard to get the full impression of its size without being there in person.

Ghazanfar's 215G Tank

In addition to spending a lot of time staring at Ghazanfar’s tank, we all prepared for a much smaller endeavor by picking up our 2.5G aquascaping tanks and equipment. You can see my progress on this tank at my previous post. There seemed to be a rush on downoi and HC in the auction at this meeting, presumably to use in the 2.5G contests. There must have been at least 5-6 bags of each sold at the auction. I picked up one of the downoi bags, which will hopefully fill the back corner of my 2.5G tank without too much trouble.

Fishing for Cherry Shrimp

After the meeting ended, Ghazanfar was nice enough to give the few remaining folks there a tour of his shrimp factory, also known as the 215G tank seen above. He has pretty much ruined the local area price for Cherry Shrimp by bringing thousands of them into our local fish store. Ghazanfar claims that at any given instant, he can siphon out his tank’s canister filter, and pull out 50-60 shrimp. We asked him to backup his claim, and so above you see him dumping filter water into a 5G bucket. To his surprise, not a single shrimp appeared. I’m not sure where he’s getting them from, but there’s no denying that he’s farmed a ton of shrimp! (My guess is that he’s finally starting to win his thus-far futile war to eradicate the shrimp from his tank.)