Last Saturday, Viktor hosted GWAPA’s April meeting. Viktor has a half dozen aquariums in his apartment, all of which are beautifully planted. We show tank is a 6 foot, 120+ gallon aquarium with a soil substrate that is thick with Cryptocoryne and several other easier plants.

I always look forward to meetings at Viktor’s house because he is constantly adding new and interesting fish to his tanks. The fish that I now want the most is a hovering loach that stays about 1.5″ long and has vertical stripes on the body.

Viktor’s 75G was lush with plants planted more Dutch style, without many hardscape items. The plants are all extremely heathly, and his tank are fairly low maintenance with soil substrates.

He has another 75G rainbowfish tank with some old M. bosemanii rainbowish that are stunning. Given the cover of Val. nana, the rainbowfish streaked from end to end of the aquarium showing great coloration.

After viewing the aquariums for awhile, Cavan Allen talked about plants from the Eriocaulaceae family, describing several plants that are not yet in the hobby. We had a good sized auction with rare plants that rival any club in the country. Yet another good GWAPA meeting!

On Saturday, Judi hosted GWAPA’s February 2012 meeting on Amano-style/Nature Aquarium Style aquascaping. I gave the presentation, and had a pretty decent turn-out of 20-25 folks show up, including several new members. We had a lot going on at this meeting, as members picked up fish/inverts from a group buy from MsJinkzd.com, Cavan Allen debuted our first “plant of the month” talk with a 5-10 minute introduction to Eriocaulon compressum, and we announced the rules for GWAPA’s member-only aquascaping contest.

Judi's 2.5G Aquarium

This year, GWAPA members voted to require all submissions to our contest be in the Nature Aquarium Style, excluding Iwagumi. Last year, we had a fun contest with similar requirements for Dutch aquascapes. You can see last year’s winning tank online at GWAPA’s website.

Judi's Other 2.5G Aquarium

Judi has an assortment of tanks scattered through-out her house, which made going from room-to-room a lot of fun. In the kitchen, she has two 2.5G aquariums side-by-side with very nice nano-scapes going on.

Judi's Aquascape with Cryptocoryne nurii

In the dining room, she had a 30G (I think) aquarium with some of the nicest looking Cryptocoryne nurii I have ever seen. At first glance, I thought it was a batch of C. wendtii, but the leaf pattern on C. nurii is unmistakable. The foreground is Eleocharis sp. ‘Belem’, with lots of Anubias, Hygrophila pinnatifida, and a few other stems throughout. Overall, it was a great way to spend a chilly and windy February afternoon.

At the end of January, GWAPA members were treated with a behind-the-scenes tour of the Amazonia Exhibit at the National Zoo. Below are pictures from that tour:

Ghazanfar Ghori hosted GWAPA’s January meeting last weekend, and I wanted to share a fantastic video that our recording secretary took of Ghazanfar’s 90-P aquarium and aquascape. The wood in this aquascape is a special wood from Southeast Asia that maintains its bark underwater without releasing too many tannins. He complements the detail in the wood with lots of Riccardia chamedryfolia (Mini Pelia) , Fissidens moss, Bolbitus, and Anubias barterii var. ‘nana’. The foreground is a very shallow layer of pool filter sand, with ADA Aquasoil in the background to provide nutrition to the plants. Check it out!

For more information about this tank, and the rest of the meeting, please see GWAPA’s website.

A couple weekends ago, GWAPA, our local aquatic plant club, held its first ever hardscaping workshop for its members. Twenty-ten is the year of the aquascape in GWAPA, as we are doing a whole series of meetings stepping thru the ins-and-outs of aquascaping, culminating in an aquascaping contest. The first meeting in this series was about setting up the hardscape (rocks/wood).

The club provided buckets of rocks and a large box of manzanita so that our members could get their hands dirty in several 10G aquariums we had setup. The idea was to provide the materials for folks to be creative, while having more experienced aquascapers in the room to assist and give pointers.

I had the privilege of doing a short presentation at the beginning of the meeting, where I showcased a number of award-winning aquascapes and pointed out how the hardscape was the foundation for why they were successful.

Our members produced a variety of different hardscapes. Some were rockscapes like the one above, using locally collected slate.

Others decided to mix manzanita and slate in their tanks. It’s not hard to figure out where this member would have planted this hardscape, leaving a path down the middle.

I was happy to see lots of collaboration among members when working on their hardscapes. Personally, I’ve found it very beneficial to aquascape by committee so because other folks can point out potential pitfalls that I would have otherwise missed.

In addition to the slate, we also had some locally collected quartz-based rock, which looks very nice in an aquascape with a bright sand foreground.

In the end, we auctioned off all of the manzanita and aquariums at reasonable prices. The auction itself was pretty sizable, and overall, I think the workshop was a success. Has your club ever done anything like this? I’d love to hear other similar types of experiences in the comments…