Fishkeeping Know-how
The underwater matchmaker
Stocking an aquascape isn’t as simple as finding something to offset your plants, writes Tom Ackrill. Here’s an overview of the fish that you should look at to partner with your own aquatic layout.
Triangular layouts are part plant, part open.
TOM ACKRILL
Hobbyist Tom is an administrator for Tropical Fishkeeping UK and has a gift for helping newcomers.
AQUASCAPES AND fish. On paper, they should be as straightforward a combination as salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, steak and chips. In practice to look at many an aquascape is to see a chasmic disparity between the two worlds, the needs of one skewed out of proportion to the needs of the other.
You could make a case that this harkens back to an age-old and persistent argument -aquascaped aquariums are in themselves somewhat artificial. When working outside of a biotope setup, when we aren’t aiming to replicate with authenticity some naturally occurring habitat, we are often applying human ideas of aesthetics, scale, and layout, in order to make our own biologically rendered artwork. Plant choices, hardscape, substrate and even lighting are considered and arranged with painstaking attention to detail, and with each rock, epiphyte, stem and moss - even the spaces between them - given their own special parts to play in the pursuit of a particular visual impression.
But the final ingredient to almost every aquascape is the livestock that inhabits it. And it is the livestock that is, unfortunately, the part that is most commonly overlooked.
We all know about the ‘rule of thirds’, the ‘golden ratio’ and other successful approaches to make that perfect aquascape, fuelled by the original masters like the great Takeshi Amano, and more recently by the likes of George Farmer, Jurijs Jutjajevs, Oliver Knott and so on. But do we apply that same rigorous discipline to the way we stock our tanks, or, do we make the error of choosing a fish for its aesthetic appearance and fitment into the ‘scape as an additional piece of décor?
In this feature I want to run through some of the most popular aquascaping styles, and perhaps join the dots between these layouts and the fish best suited to them.