AGA Aquascaping Contest 2010

Oh, I'm so excited, the Aquatic Gardeners Association Aquascaping Contest 2010 results just came in. I love looking through the tank photos and seeing all the beautiful designs. Link: http://showcase.aqua...e=view-showcase
Link specifically to the biotope section: http://showcase.aqua...tegory=1&vol=-1

Have any of us NANFA members ever entered the Biotope aquarium category? I've seen photos of a lot of really nice stream setups here and I think they'd be pretty highly ranked if they got entered in the contest.

Edited by EricaWieser, 11 December 2010 - 03:41 PM.

Hmm. This person claims that ceratophyllum demersum and vallisneria americana are indigenous to Australia: http://showcase.aqua...=1&vol=-1&id=53 Is that true?

Edit: OMG it is. How are Ceratophyllum demersum and Vallisneria americana native to both the north american continent and Australia? Weird.

Edited by EricaWieser, 12 December 2010 - 02:03 PM.

Aaanyway, yup, I checked and I don't see any stream biotope aquariums from North America. They're not well represented in the contest.

There's some really neat stuff in there. I much prefer the biotopes to the manicured mini-landscapes.

As far as plant distributions go, several submerged and floating aquatic plants have nearly worldwide distributions. I would guess it has to do with the fact that many of them can reproduce vegetatively, so a) any fragment that is somehow transported can found a new population, and b) the new population is genetically similar to the old population (founder effect and genetic drift are less important in asexually reproducing organisms), so you don't end up with rapid divergence in the new population.