I wanted to post a small update on my 75G since my latest post. In that post I talked about how my original intent was to make three separate mounds with pathways between them. I still have that, but the more I looked at the tank, the more I felt that the right side wasn’t strong enough. So, I pulled out the remaining pieces of African bogwood that I had, and started toying around.

75G: Click for Larger Image

What I ended up with was an arch connecting the two mounds on the right. The mounds themselves haven’t changed, but the archway adds more height, making the right side the dominant side of the aquascape. The arch also mirrors a smaller arch on the left side. The only downside is that this essentially turned the scape into a two mound aquascape again, which is what I was originally trying to avoid. That said, I think it’s unique enough to let it grow in for awhile. Also, the  Glosso is starting to spread rapidly, and the Cryptocoryne and Trident Java Fern are slowly starting to recover from being moved around and hydrogen peroxide sprayed for algae. Comments welcome!

Back in September, a fellow GWAPA member, Michael, asked me to come and take pictures of his beautiful 210G aquarium so that he would have something to submit to the AGA competition. I previously blogged about this experience, but at the time, didn’t want to post the pictures until after the AGA competition had been decided. Below are a few more pictures from the shoot:

The 210G gallon aquarium acts as a room divider between Michael’s living room and dining room so that it is visible from three sides. This provides the unique challenge of making all three sides equally pleasing to look at. The picture above is what Michael considered the “front.” This shot was a lot of fun to take because I was behind the camera holding a flash up in the air toward the ceiling to bounce light from the ceiling into the tank. His wife was holding a hair dryer over-top of the water, creating the ripple effect, and Michael was to the right of tank trying to coax his pet discus to line up in a nice row like you see.

The “front” side of the aquarium is dominated by a beautiful stand of Nymphea lotus, with a really nice portion of Lagenandra meeboldii ‘pink’ to the left of it. The “back” of the aquarium(above) was much less vibrant in coloration, but still showed tremendous growth in the Cryptocoryne lutea and Blyxa aubertii. I’ve since heard that he has drastically thinned out these plants to provide more space for the discus.

The full cabinet that the aquarium sits on was custom made, and is very well done. I don’t know how he keeps the white stand looking so nice, but he does. I also really like how he used emersed growing Anubias to obscure drip-tube that provide new water to the tank daily.

Finally, with quite a few nice discus shots, I couldn’t help myself from trying to get a little bit artsy with one of them. I especially liked the shot above because it reminded me of the pictures I looked at as a child in old black-and-white aquarium books from the library. In any case, I promised that I would share more photos was the AGA released their results, so I wanted to keep good on that word. You can find more technical information about Michael’s aquarium, as well as, the AGA judges’ comments on the Aquatic Gardener’s website.

Happy New Year! —  I hope everyone had a nice holiday! I’ve been mostly offline for the last two weeks painting about 90% of my house. We’ve lived in our house for 8 years and had done a fair number of home improvement projects during that time, but somehow, painting wasn’t one of them. As you can imagine, aquariums can make home improvement projects such as these quite difficult, as a full aquarium is not very amenable to moving so that you can paint behind it. Therefore, a couple days before Christmas, I moved my 75G from our family room into my fish-room where all of my other tank are now congregated. This was the perfect time to do a quick new aquascape.

75G - Scaped 12/20/2009 - Click for Larger Image

I decided to try and make this aquascape fairly low maintenance, so besides the Staurogyne sp. ‘Porto Vehlo’ and Glossostigma elatinoides used in the foreground, I didn’t use any stem plants. The past couple of aquascapes I’ve done seem to consist of two mounds on either side of the aquarium, one larger than the other, with a pathway down the middle. I decided to try something a bit differently this time making three mounds, several pathways, and a fairly low profile so that the pathways could continue directly from the front to the back of the tank uninhibited. I reused most of the hardscape and plants that were previously in the 75G, and unfortunately, many of those had hair algae. Being distracted by my painting task, I pretty much neglected to dose for the last two weeks. Plus, I used some extra used Aquasoil I had in a bucket to make more of a slope in the mounds, which added a lot of silt to the substrate, creating cloudy water anytime one of the fish was spooked. So, I’m now faced with the difficult task of eliminating algae in a planted tank with slow growing and newly planted plants which likely won’t be able to outcompete it for the next little while. I’m hopeful that frequent water changes, Seachem Excel and H202 spot treatments, and cranked CO2 will hold the algae at bay and get the Glosso and S. ‘Porto Vehlo‘ going to outgrow the algae. Right now the Cryptocoryne and Trident Java Fern are looking a little sad from the transplanting, but hopefully they’ll fill in and create a nice lush aquascape. Comments/critiques welcome!

This weekend, Jason Baliban, award-winning aquascaper and recent judge of the AGA contest, invited a few GWAPA and DVAGA members to his home to aquascape a brand new 180G aquarium. He had obtained the aquarium a few months ago, and spent that time acquiring the materials needed to set it up.

When I arrived, he already had his hardscape setup and ready to go. He had the patience to spend much of the past few months tweaking the hardscape so that it would be perfect. This is always the hardest and most critical element in aquascaping, but as you can see below, the rocks and wood look pretty solid.

One of the goals for this tank was to set it up and let it mature without much regular maintenance. Therefore, he choose to only use four types of easy plants: Needle-Leaf Java Fern, Trident Java Fern, Bolbitis, and Anubias. Due to the very large size of the tank (roughly 6’x2’x2′), he had to amass a significant number of plants.

Since none of these plants were to be rooted in the substrate, he only used pool filter sand as a substrate. Of course, this means that Jason will need to fertilize the aquarium regularly to provide nutrition to the plants. Pretty much all of the plants were positioned in the aquarium by using zip-ties to attach them to rocks, then placing the rocks into the hardscape.

Jason placed Anubias in the front of the tank, letting Bolbitis and Java Fern in the background. He decided to leave the wood free of moss, at least for the time-being. We planted the aquarium 100% dry, so the plants needed to be sprayed with a water bottle periodically to prevent them from drying out.

Due to Jason’s great planning and preparation, it probably only took 20-30 minutes to plant the aquarium. You can see below that it looked pretty darn good even without water in the tank.

Filling a tank with 180 gallons of water takes a long time! We sat around talking about plants, aquascaping, and sports while we waited over an hour for the water to reach the rim. Jason was a little worried that the wood might float, so you can see that he weighed down a few pieces with extra rocks to let them saturate with water.

I’m really glad that I was able to make it up to Jason’s house for this aquascaping. As one of the premier aquascapers in the U.S., there’s always something you can learn from him. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a quality person as well! Be sure to pop over to Jason’s website at ProjectAquarium.com to let him know what you think of the scape. (You can leave comments here too.)

The results of the Aquatic Gardener’s Association’s 2009 Aquascaping Contest have been released. Michael G.W. Wong’s tank below one 1st place in the Large category, and took Best in Show. The folks from Hong Kong have really been cleaning up the aquascaping contests lately. The contest itself has a number of fantastic entries, including ones that didn’t win any prizes.

I’d suggest you click over to the AGA’s website to view all of this years’ entries:

http://showcase.aquatic-gardeners.org/2009.cgi