Saltwater Aquarium Advice

Biotoping your marine aquarium is a craze that is quickly gaining in popularity these days. The word biotope translates from Greek and means “life place”. Basically creating a biotope aquarium means imitating a naturally occurring habitat in the ocean along with the key species that inhabit that region. The aim is to try and associate fish, invertebrates and even plants and substrate native to the same region. Because they have evolved in parallel they should have similar environmental requirements. The most common biotope aquariums are corals reefs with a few must have fish species from different regions around the world.

An example would be to aquascape and stock a tank based on what species you would find in the Great Barrier reef, the Caribbean, Hawaiian, Pacific islands. As well as this geographic biotoping you can also biotope reefs based on different reef regions and zones such as the outer reef, reef crest, lagoon, Mangrove root system, Seagrass beds just to name a few.

The coolest way to get into biotoping is to go snorkelling or diving somewhere and just fall in love with the beauty of what you saw there and want to go home and replicate it in your own house. With the general health of the worlds oceans and reefs going backward alarmingly quickly biotoping is becoming of increasing importance. Pretty soon some of these natural environments may be wiped out, and future generations would only be able to catch a glimpse of what existed by visiting biotope aquariums. Biotope set ups can even allow us to learn more about the natural interactions of species that have evolved together as opposed to regular marine aquariums where species from different geographical origins are just thrown together and expected to live in perfect harmony.

If you are considering setting up a biotope aquarium careful research and planning is the order of the day. Choose what geographical region you want to concentrate on, there may even be a tiny ecosystem in this area you want to replicate. You will need to identify all the key species that dominate your area and choose a few must have specimens you want to concentrate on. The idea here is to come up with either 1 or 2 must have fish or corals, then set everything else up around these, making sure the accompanying organisms are native to the same biotope and are compatible with your key species. If you do this correctly you will not only have a stunning true-to-nature aquarium but may see the result of millions of years of harmonious evolution in the interactions of your new pets.

For more information on creating the perfect saltwater aquarium set up and having simply thriving marine pets check out what my best selling ebook  “Ultimate Secrets To Saltwater Aquarium Fish and Invertebrates” has to offer.

Tags: Biotope, marine aquarium, marine fish, Reef Aquariums, saltwater aquarium, saltwater aquarium set up

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 10:44 am and is filed under Biotope Aquariums, Reef Aquariums, saltwater aquarium set up, selecting marine life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.