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.

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.

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.)

GWAPA’s aquascaping contest is currently underway after we handed out the equipment at our May meeting. So, what did I do? I went straight home, filled my tank with aquasoil, popped in some new bulbs into my old fixture, and setup the aquascape below.

Obviously, this is a mound style of aquascape, using the downoi and blyxa japonica to highlight the rocks. In the middle is anubias barterii nana var. ‘petite’ with crassula helmsii in the foreground. I have a little bit of ranalisma rostrata in the back right to transition to a better height from the blyxa japonica. I’m still deciding how much I like this scape, but I hope to have it grow in with enough time to take a picture and try another scape before the October deadline. Hopefully that’s allowed. 😉

I had the good fortune of hosting GWAPA’s April meeting this past weekend. Preparing for any aquarium-related meeting is always a challenge because in addition to the usual cleaning and setting up when any folks are coming over, you also want your tanks to look their best. This can sometimes require planning as much as a few months ahead. For example, in my 75G (updated picture below), I replanted the glosso about six weeks before the meeting, anticipating that it would take about that long to fill in.

Then, for the two weeks prior to the actual meeting, you have to time your water changes, and trimming sessions exactly, so that your stems plants will reach their perfect “bushiness” on the meeting date. Combine that with increased glass scraping, and more consistent dosing, and you’re looking at a bit of work. I’m not complaining because I enjoy all of it, and find that my tanks look the best because of my increased effort. The rest of the year is a crap shoot, however!

This month’s meeting had another nice turnout, reaching 15-20 folks. The weather was beautiful outside, which made talking about my raised-brick pond, much more enjoyable. It’s still too cold outside to actually grow many of my aquatic plants, so I had to cheat a little bit by covering the surface of the pond with lots of Phyllanthus fluitans from my 54G tank. I promise that I really do grow plants outdoors later in the year. I went through a brief overview about how I constructed the pond, and what my experiences were last year. After my pond talk, we all went inside for our auction, which was large and lively as always. The manzanita wood that the club purchased was met with very much interest, as were most items in the auction. I came away with a few goodies, namely an Eriocaulon species that I haven’t tried before. I also added another Red Lizard Catfish to my 75G. (Thanks Cristy!)

More pictures and info can be read on GWAPA’s website.

GWAPA’s March 2007 meeting was another great meeting, this one at Sean Murphy’s home. For a guy known for his Cryptocoryne expertise, he sure can put together an amazing aquascape. This nano-tank to the left, sits innocently on his kitchen counter, with only a desk lamp over top. The desk-lamp sports only a daylight compact-fluorescent spiral bulb. I didn’t measure it, but I believe it’s just an 8″ cube, but he’s made it look much bigger here. Nice work Sean! This tank aside, the rest of Sean’s tanks are all “crypt farms.”

The topic for this meeting was “Growing Aquatic Plants Emerged.” A meeting summary can be found on the GWAPA website.

I was excited about this meeting because I had lined up a trade with Rob to swap my Apistogramma panduros for a half dozen of his Apistogramma sp. ‘Rotpunkt.’ So far they’re settling into my 40G nicely, but are still too young to sex. I hope to post some pictures of them up here soon.

Besides this fish swap, there was a huge auction this month with just about any plant you can think of being auctioned — everything from java moss to sunset hygrophilia to any of the more exotic cultivars you can think of. I only came away with two items, but I’m excited about getting them going. My auction wins are Ludwigia sp. ‘Guinea’ and Bacopa sp. ‘Araguaia.’ I kept Ludwigia sp. ‘Guinea’ previously, but I think it got overgrown by Rotala macrandra var. ‘Green,’ and subsequently melted away. I haven’t kept many Bacopa’s because there’s something about their vertical stance that is unappealing to me, but I’m going to give this one a try nevertheless. Even if I don’t like the look, who can deny the minty smell of its leaves?

This weekend, GWAPA held its February meeting at Rob’s house in Herdon, VA. This month, GWAPA demonstrated how to aquascape a tank from start to finish. Ghazanfar and Jeff (president and vice president) worked together to scape a mid-sized tank. (I think it was a 30-40 gallon tank.) The substrate was Soilmaster Select (Charcoal) with a layer of peat underneath. Rob also had some of our wonderful California porous mossy rock, and a number of a plants from the auction. As you can see, the scape turned out pretty nice. It’s glosso in the foreground, with dwarf sag and blyxa japonica in the midground. Finally, pogostemon stelleta ‘broad-leaf’, p. yadabeanus, and some crypts make up the background. After looking at the pictures, the only thing I’d change would be to remove the crypts. Eitherway, pretty good for a couple hours work!

Coming into the meeting, I knew that AaronT (coresponding secretary) wasn’t going to be attending, so I took it upon myself to make sure the auction had plenty of plants. Of course, lots of people bring plants, but Aaron always brings so many exotics that I wanted to make sure it was interesting. Mainly, I just wanted to make sure that I continued to spread around the P. yatabeanus that I had gotten in an auction 2 meetings ago. All-in-all, I brought about 12 bags of plants. What I didn’t expect was to end up the auctioneer! I did my best to keep everything moving along, but I have a new respect for those folks who can get up and really sell items in auctions.

On Saturday, I attended GWAPA’s first meeting of the new year. The topic of the meeting was about low-tech aquariums, meaning, aquariums without CO2, high light, or excessive dosing. Since most of my tanks are fairly high-tech, it’s always good for me to remember that folks can maintain really nice planted aquarium at a fraction of the cost or effort that I do. My 54G tank is my only real low-tech tank that I try to keep looking nice, and it’s amazing how many guest we have over that marvel over that particular tank, and then hardly mention the other ones. I tell myself that it’s simply due to the low-tech tank being near the entranceway of our home.

Anyway, the meeting was great. It looks like it’s going to be a great year for GWAPA with lots of stuff in the works. The “mini” auction of not really mini at all, and I came away with some great plants to try. I managed to snag Crasula helmsii, a fine-leaved, creeping foreground plant, crypt. molmanei (for my 54G anubias/crypt tank), and a bag of HC since I still haven’t tried that yet.

Finally, I had my first opportunity to get out of the house to test my new camera, the Canon Rebel XTi. I have a lot to learn, but I really like how this camera is working so far. The pictures of Viktor’s rainbowfish are using my 17-85mm zoom lense.

After the last weekend’s GWAPA meeting, a few of us headed out to a drainage ditch, where there were supposedly a few eriocaulon plants to be found. We wound our way through some of the more rural parts surrounding Leesburg, VA, until we finally came to this run-off ditch, pictured below.

Sure enough, we found a number of plants there resembling an eriocaulon species. So, we dug one or two out to try in our tanks. I was currently without tank space to dedicate to this, so I left the task up to a few other GWAPA members. Pictured below is a bad picture of what we pulled out. Upon further inspection, it seems unclear whether this actually is one of the rare eriocaulon decangulare species found in Virginia, or whether it’s just an eleocharis species. If anyone has any insight, please speak up.

The National Zoo in Washington D.C. was kind enough to give GWAPA behind-the-scene tours of two of their exhibits – Invertebrates and Amazonia. Both tours were fantastic, so I wanted to share a few pictures from our tours.

The coral on the right is believed to be the largest captive-kept coral of it’s type.

GWAPA members looking at the salt-mixing station for all of the Invertebrate tanks.

Checking out a big tank.

Watching as they try to feed a large starfish on the glass.

Hermit crab.

Spiny lobster. They later fed this lobster while we were there.

Baby Cuttlefish being reared behind the scenes prior displaying to the public.

Fairly young arowana cruising around the service of the pool-style tank in Amazonia.

Java moss carpet, with lots of LARGE fish!

Emergent growth from the pool.

Two very large Arapaima. Amazingly, they showed us two young Arapaima behind-the-scenes that would easily fit in our conventional aquariums, albeit, not for long.

Those are big filters!

View of one of the pools, looking down on it from the rain-forest style display above.

And what would a trip to the zoo be without seeing the seals?

Well, I couldn’t manage to pull out a win for 1st place in the advanced category. GWAPA members awarded first place to Sean’s tank pictured below. Congrats Sean!