 Biotope Contest
How about having an adjunct Biotope contest?
I am concerned about the direction of the AGA biotope contest since it has no guidelines. This would give us a chance to develop some guidelines among our members and then have us try them out. The preparation could be used as an on-line learning experience and also prep us for the AGA contest.
A biotope contest would give us members who like to walk in the local ditches to find their plants a chance to have their work recognized since these kind of tanks are often based on natural design, and do not often meet conventional planted aquaria aquascaping contest criteria.
If you wanted to limit it, which I think is a good idea, we could limit it to one of my favorite types of biotope, the Local Biotope, where the entrant is limited to his/her local environment within say a 25 mile radius of his residence. This would also eliminate the very general theme type of biotopes, which are my least favorite, such as having someone putting a bunch of rocks into a tank and calling it an African Rift Lake Biotope.
I think it would generate far less participation than the aquascape category but there are a significant number of our members who are biotopists, and we could probably get others to participate.
Steve Pituch |