Erik Olson gave a short presentation about the future of the AGA at the concluding banquet. Afterwards, he led straight into the results for the 2006 AGA Aquascaping Contest. There were a number of great entries in this year’s contest, including a couple quite innovative ones that didn’t win anything. I have to say that I don’t necessarily agree with all of the awards, but that’s true with any contest. I did notice a dearth of quality U.S. entries, so I would like to encourage everyone in the U.S. to submit their tanks next year, regardless of the state of it. (I’m guilty of not submitting this year as well, so I’ll be the first to take my advice next year.)

There were a number of excellent entries from Asia, including this aquascape to the left that one first place. As they were going through the entries, the judges of the contest were up front giving their comments on each of the winners. It’s always good to hear what the rational for judgment is, even is you don’t necessarily agree with it. To me, the most innovative entry in the contest is one that didn’t win anything. This entry by Gary Wu in China features a waterfall that is quite impressive.

The final part of the banquet involved the IronMan Aquascaping Challenge between the two ADA store staffs in the U.S: Jeff Senske and his team verses the AquaForest team. There were limited rocks, manzanita wood, and plants to use.  Right from the get go, the competitors, grabbed the hardscape materials that they wanted to use. Jeff decided to use more of a X pattern for his wood, and probably started on the short end of the stick with his hardscape due to a lack of materials up to the quality he’s used to. (If you don’t know, his rock and wood pile is supposed to be of legendary proportions down in Texas.)

Ultimately, the winner was the AquaForest team. (poorly pictured below)

Day 2 of the AGA convention was a packed day of events. The Vendor room was always buzzing, mostly around Aqua Forest’s (left) table of ADA goods. They had everything from trimming tools, to supplements, substrate, and even a small-sized ADA tank.

I missed the first presentation of the day by Dorothy Reimer about “Basic Growing and Keeping Live Plants.” However, Troels Andersen, from Tropica, presented next about “Plants’ Acclimation to Life Under Water.” Troels gave a brief overview of some of the research he’s done at Tropica and during his graduate studies. Basically, he talked about the basic requirements most plants have in the aquarium. He offered up a few statements such that fertilizing your substrate is often more efficient than fertilizing the water column, saying that most plants will develop the roots necessary to find those nutrients, while keeping the elements out of the water column where algae can use them.
He also talked about lighting and CO2, saying that generally in a tank, 100% of your light reaches the bottom in the center of the tank, while the corners see 25% of the light that is in the center. He also claims that harder water encourages more species of plants to grow in the same area. Finally, Troels showed a number of slides talking about how plants changed when they’re underwater verses immersed. Basically, they increased their surface area when underwater in order to maximize the CO2 exchange between the plant and water. When, immersed, due to the abundance of CO2 in the air, this is no longer necessary.

Ricky Cain gave a short presentation of people and things that inspire him in the hobby. He listed a number of folks including Amano, Jeff Senske, Luis Navarro, Oliver Knott, and a number of other folks.

Next, George Batten of Seachem gave a short chemistry lesson about “Chemistry in the Planted Aquarium.” Not a huge aquarist himself, George presented from a different viewpoint than most of the people in the room view the hobby. Basically, various growers and scientists tell him what chemicals and proteins a particular plant needs, and he works to manufacture something that meets those needs. He described a number of chemical reactions that go on when a plant actually extracts a nutrient from the water column/substrate. For example, a rooted plant will release a weak acid from the roots into the substrate. This acid/chemical will solibolize iron, converting it from the ferric to the ferrous form, which can them be absorbed by the plant. Later in the presentation, someone tried to get him to talk a little bit about Excel’s algaecide properties, but in the funniest part of the talk, he already had a prepared statement from SeaChem’s CEO that was the usual legal EPA verbiage.

The last speaker of the conference was Ole Pedersen, also from Tropica. Ole gave an interesting talk about “aquascapes in the natural world.” Basically, Ole showed a number of videos and pictures of various places across the world, from Denmark to Greenland; all of them contained underwater planted lakes or streams that where quite beautiful. He called these natural creations, “Natural Aquascapes.” Also, he gave a slightly different theory than Troels about how plants exist. Basically, he says the most plants in streams uptake nutrients from the water column, while plants in lakes uptake most of them from substrate. The reason, Ole states is that streams are high flowing, constant enriched by CO2 and nutrients from upstream, while lakes are mostly sedimentary, with few currents, leaving nutrient poor and CO2 poor environments. As far as the natural aquascape goes, the currents in streams shape the plants according to the flow of water, while lakes usually have less impressive aquascapes because there this shaping factor is usually missing.

Finally, Ole picked a couple “best of show” natural aquascapes below:

After many months of waiting, the 2006 Aquatic Gardeners’ Association Conference is underway after president, Erik Olson, welcomed all attendees. He introduced many of the speakers for the weekend conference, and asked several local clubs to come up to the podium to speak about their activities. There was a brief, unexpected intermission, when one of the folks, who will rename unnamed, fainted at the podium, and needed some time to readjust themselves to their surroundings.

Fortunately, everything resumed without a hitch, and our first speaker, Eric Do gave the opening presentation about invertebrates. Eric is from the host club, the San Francisco Bay Area Aquatic Plant Society, and gave an excellent presentation with many very professional-like macro photos of shrimp, snails, crayfish, and even triops. He described how he uses the “drip-method” to acclimate all of his new arrivals, and recommended feeding them a number of prepared foods, veggies, with a new homemade food by a hobbist in Finland, being especially good. Eric covered pretty much any small shrimp in the hobby, including cherry reds, amano shrimp, cardinia sp. ‘red dragon’, green shrimp, bee shrimp, tiger shrimp, crystal reds, ghost shrimp, etc. The green shrimp were particularly interesting because the photos Eric showed demonstrated how they camouflaged themselves based on their environment. He also talked about how some of the more expensive shrimp are graded, using crystal reds as an example. Basically, the width and number of white bands on a crystal red define how “good” of a shrimp it is. He mentioned how folks in Asia are trying to selectively breed a crystal red shrimp that is entirely white, with all the white bands merging together.

Eric wrapped up his presentation by going over a number of other small invertebrates, spending the most time on dwarf crayfish – the cajun and orange varieties. After that, he quickly flipped through a couple of pictures of various snails, triops, and a few other VERY small invertebrates.

The second, and last, presentation for the evening was about Aquarium Photography by Jeff Senske of Aquarium Design Group, in Houston, Texas. Jeff is well-known in the aquarium community, and on the online forums, for pictures of his tanks. He wanted to briefly share a few of his tips and tricks to successfully shooting an aquarium. A few tips:

• Add extra light over the tank. (Flash, or another light strip)
• Use a high F-stop for more depth of field
• Use a low shuttle speed so your fish aren’t blurry.
• Never use your camera’s auto-mode.
• Shoot in RAW mode, if your camera supports this.
• Underexposure is easier to fixed in Photoshop, than overexposure.
• Take a Photoshop class. He recommended NAPP classes. This will teach how to properly use layers, brushes, and curves. (These are the three basic things he described as being essential to touch-up photographs.)

Obviously, he gave a lot more detail through demonstration about these various topics, but it’s not really possible to describe them all here.

Overall, a pretty good opening night. The vendor room is setup, and very nice. Aqua Forest is present, showing off lots of ADA goods. SeaChem, Ray Lucas, Zoomed, and otheres are also here.

We arrived at the Monterey Bay Aquarium around 9:00am this morning. They shuffled us into a large conference room, with coffee and pastries, and gave a short presentation about what is currently housed at the aquarium, and what is in the works for the next couple of years. The new Otter exhibit will feature a number of freshwater focused tanks, including at least one large planted tank.

After the presentation, we split up into 6 smaller groups so that we could easily get in and out of the various behind-the-scenes rooms. There were a number of very interesting rooms that they took us through. It’s amazing to see the scale on which they work. For example, look at these huge tubes of green water being culture to raise daphnia and of small invertebrates. There were at least 5 of these in a row.

They used all of these things are food to raise everything from fish fry to baby jellyfish. They had a number of acrylic circular tanks specially designed to rear jellyfish babies to full size. Basically, the tank is designed to keep a constant circular flow of water so that the jellyfish are in constant suspension. Any intake or outtake pipes are screened, with powerheads blowing water across them so that jellyfish would not get stuck in the screen.
We moved to the roof to look down on their very impressive Kelp-forest. The Packard’s specially designed a plunger style pump to simulate waves inside of this tank. You can literally watch the top of the water oscillate up and foot by a difference of a foot every few seconds. The Kelp Forest itself is amazing. They have Kelp algae spanning over 2 stories tall. The tour guide mentioned that in the wild a Kelp stem can grow 14 inches every day. They get about half of that growth in captivity. During the day they pump in filtered seawater to keep it cleared. At night, they pump in raw seawater, bringing in all kinds of plankton and nutrients to sustain the inhabitants of this tank.

Finally, we got to see some experimental aquascapes for the tanks that will end up in one of their new exhibits. They’re showing plants from Africa and Asia. The tanks themselves are all custom built acrylic tanks, with the largest one being about 4 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot. They use SeaChem Oynx Sand and gravel in the tank, with metal hallides floating above the tank. Of course, these are not the final tanks, or aquascapes, but tests to see what plants grow well in their conditions.

The largest tank is very impressive (below), and shows that their final exhibit with definitely be something to marvel at. The fauna are species native to the habitat that they’re trying to represent. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which tank is which habitat. I’ll post more pictures from the public side of the aqarium as I have more time. Great first part of Day 1! The actually AGA convention is set to start in a couple hours.

Today was the final day of the 2006 Catfish Convention, and consisted solely of an all-day auction. This auction was made up of 10 lots, plus a dry-goods lot run by Ray “Kingfish” Lucas to help raise money for next year’s convention. The auction started at 10:00am. By 1:00, there were so many items to auction, that they had only gotten through lots 1 and 2, and the dry goods. I didn’t stay until the end because I had blackworms that I needed to get home to the refrigerator, but I imagine it went on for hours after I left.

(Everyone checked out the auction goods before it started.) 

I came home with a fair amount of “loot” from this convention. I don’t have any pictures of it now, but I’m sure I’ll post some in the future:

I came home with a fair amount of “loot” from this convention. I don’t have any pictures of it now, but I’m sure I’ll post some in the future:

• anubias barterii nana “petite”
• 3 Red Lizard Whiptail Catfish
• crypt. wentii. (thanks Sean)
• 2 pairs of Dwarf Crayfish, regular brown variety.
• 5 juenvenille L-279 Bristlenosed Plecos (Ancistrus sp.”Huacamayo”)
• 13 young melanotaenia praecox rainbowfish.
• 1 Pair apistogramma viejitas (This is my favorite pull for the weekend!)
• 1 potion of Blackworms from Eastern Aquatics.

Today was the second day of the 2006 Catfish Convention. I was able to attend most of the sessions today, and I must say that all were of very high quality. Tomorrow, the convention will wrap up with an all-day auction.

The first session of the day was about African catfish, and was presented by Mark Soberman. Mark gave a brief overview of the 9 families of catfish native to the contient. A few highlights included Austraglanidae, who are an endangered species in South Africa. Of course, he had to mention the Claridae family of catfishes, who are an air-breathing group of catfishes that are now banned in the U.S. after a series of incidents related to Snakeheads. Don’t forget the Malapteruidae, who include a few electric catfish, and the Mochakiadae, who are Africa’s largest family of catfish.

Really, all of these were just leading up to Mark’s favorite group of African catfish, the Synodontus. Synodontis catfsh include many of the fish we are familar with in our LFS’s, such as the upside-down catfish. He describe a number of fishes, but also lamented a little bit, at the current influx of Synodontis hybrid fishes coming out of Singapore fisheries. Mark feels that African catfish species are unique enough in their own right, that the hybridization only confuses hobbiests.

Inbetween sessions, I decided to take a trip down the hall to the Fish Showroom. This room have about 200 tanks in it, stocked full of conference attendee’s best fish from their fishrooms. There were more than just catfish represented in this rooms; there were: catfish, killies, bettas, cichlids, livebearers, danios, pretty much any class of fish you can think of.

After purusing the fish, and admiring more than a handful of beautiful specimens, I headed back to the lecture hall for Ian Fuller’s second talk of the conference about Breeding Corydoras.

Ian covered all aspects of his breeding techniques for Corys. He recommends the following:

– buy fish already at breeding age.

– know how to seperate males from females. For example, males often have an elongated ventral fin. Females usually have broader bodies. Males are usually the more colorful fish.

– Use smaller tanks, such as 10-20 gallons.

– Use RO water, adjusting it to 6.5-7.0 PH, GH 0-3 degrees, mix in 1 part Epson salt, 1 part Marine Salt, and 2 parts chalk.

– Use fine grained salt/gravel. Do NOT use a bare-bottom tank because it’s bad for the Cory’s barbles.

– Setup the tanks with oak leaves, beech twigs, java fern/moss, etc.

– Feed a variety of foods. Brine shrimp, microworms, earth worms, and Tetra tabs are especially good.

– Trigger spawning by doing massive water changes, temperature changes, PH crashes, etc.

– When you see eggs, add Alder cones to the water as a mild anti-fungal treatment. Move the eggs to a hatching container with Java moss.

The last session I attended today was by Dr. Peter Unmack about Austrailian catfishes. I think that Dr. Unmack might have had the most interesting talk of the day, largely because it featured catfish that I had never seen before.

There are only two families of catfish in Austrailia. Many of the species in these families actually spend a portion of their life in saltwater. Many are mouthbrooders (pictured right). Unfortunately, there aren’t many Austrailian catfish that are suitable for aquaria. Furthermore, the ones that are, rarely are seen because their natural habitats are too remote to easily collect and ship. This is a shame because most of these catfish would be relatively easy to keep. For example, they can tolerate a wide range of PH swings because in nature, when streams flood, the solids are diluted, causing the PH to drop. But, when the water recedes, the PH skyrockets. The catfish don’t care. Infact, this fluxation might trigger spawning.

The Plutosidae family is a really interesting family of catfishes. The look like someone took a South American catfish’s head, and put it on the body of a knifefish, or eel.

One of the most widely distributed fishes from this family is the Neosilurus hyrtlii (left). As you can see, they don’t have distinct caudral or dorsal fins. Peter also described the Neosiluroides cooperensis, which he thinks is one of the most bizarre catfish in Austrailia. This fish is found in Cooper Creek, has unusually good eyesight, and is an adept predator of other fish and shrimp. They lay huge eggs, and are rarely caught under 6″ in size. In his experience, it will kill anything it see’s.

Peter wrapped up his talk with a slideshow of other Austrailian fish, including rainbowfish and gobies.

After this session, I decided that I couldn’t risk not buying a few fish/crayfish that were on sale out of one of the hotel rooms, so I promptly bought more than I needed, and headed home to put my new fish in their tanks.

Today was the first day of the All Aquarium 2006 Catfish Convention put on by the Potomac Valley Aquarium Society, a large local aquarium club. The program director is Andrew Blumhagen (left), who opened the convention by introducing to us hobbiest, and corydora expert, Ian Fuller (right), all the way from Great Britain.

Ian’s first, of two, presentations at this convention was largely about identifying corydoradine catfish. He presented a number of well drawn slides, such as the one below, showing in detail the growing number of problems in the

classification system of these fish. Basically, he demonstrated how two entirely different species can look too similar to differentiate when put side-by-side. His claim, is that you must know the exact locality to correctly identify the fish. Toward the end of his talk, he mentioned that the situation is only being exacerbated by human factors, such as deforestation, pollution, and dam construction. These factors are causing species to migrate out of their normal habitat, entering new environment. The changes in their environment are causing the fish to develop different color morphs, further complicating identification.

The second speaker at the convention was Lee Finley, who gave a presentation focusing solely on how to feed your catfish the kind of food they would normally eat in the wild. Basically, catfish don’t just eat algae and detritus when in the wild. Depending on the species, they’ll eat wood, bark, algae, detritus, veggie matter, fish, insects, larvae, worms, the list goes on. His slide of the commonly known Vampire Pleco, or Rabbit Tooth Pleco, illustrated how specialized some of these catfish have become. These Plecos used their “two front teeth” to chisel away at wood, searching for inserts; much like a wood pecker would do in a forest. Unfortunately, Lee had to rush through his talk in order for everyone to make it to the much anticipated Italian dinner.

Finally, the last topic I was able to hear for the day was put on by Dinyar and Rusty Lalkaka. This father and son duo gave us a quick tour a number of interesting Asian catfishes. Even though Asian Catfish are only second to South American fish in terms of the diversification of both species and genus, few hobbiest know or keep them. One of the lone exceptions is probably the glass catfish, which are at every LFS in the world.
The last two topics were titled “Catfishes in the Classroom” and “Breeding Loricariids.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stick around for those two, but I’m sure they were quite interesting. Stay tuned for more convention coverage from Day 2, tomorrow!