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Re: Tank aesthetics? or anesthetics?




Sherman Lovel wrote:
[...]
> Or someone the other day on
> rec.aquaria.tech was talking about tubes connecting tanks that fish
> could swim through -- a fishy habitrail home.  I know this is the
> slippery slope, but I'd be curious to hear about any of the more
> imaginitive tanks that people have done.

There's a guy up here in Seattle that actually makes these sorts of things
(also does adverts in our club newsletter; gotta get that disclaimer out
there).  The tanks are pretty pricey, sometimes (IMHO) garish, and I think
he's finding that he sells more "simple yet elegant" bullet tanks than the
complicated "Escher" tank with the tubes running every which way.  
Anyway, he's got a website with some of pictures of the design.  (What am
I saying?  You're on drizzle.com; you've probably seen them in stores
around here!)

http://www.nwcatalog.com/flyingfish/

This also reminds me of some setups I've seen in Annual Shows.  Our
Seattle club doesn't have annual shows, but the two nearest neighbors
(portland and bremerton) do, and there are always "Aquarium Beautiful" and
"theme aquarium" categories in the competition, the latter often featuring
one or two very imaginative displays. One year someone entered a tank with
bleeding heart tetras, and they did the deco's color scheme up to match
the fish, and made it look like the fish were a moving painting on the
wall;  another was "las vegas" themed, with gambling equipment and glass
drink tumblers, etc, all sunken and used as decorations.  The Aquarium
Beautiful category gets a few more entries than the theme tanks, but they
usually fall short because it's a big pain for most to tear down their
tanks and rebuild the week of the show... often it's built using plants
right from the store, still in their pots.  Some are filled with evil bog
plants (see, for instance http://www.gsas.org/Articles/1996/pres9605.html
for a picture of one), a dead giveaway they just bought the plants.
Another recurring theme is "stuff in lots of species". :) The
award-winning entries seem to rely heavily on old bogwood-affixed Anubias,
Java Fern and the like, which can be easily moved and backfilled with stem
plants. 

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com