What is a Biotope?
Definition of biotope
: a region uniform in environmental conditions and in its populations of animals and plants for which it is the habitat.
So you’ve heard the word biotope before and you might be asking what people are talking about.
Biotope to me is when you take a slice of a specific site, maybe a part of a river in the Amazon, or a peaty swamp from a specific part of Borneo, and you try and replicate that in your tank. From substrate to water conditions, plants, fish and even the amount of light, the aim is to get as close to that as you can, and then make it better.
For example, you do not add the predators and the prey. You do not mimic the pollution impacting so much of nature, and you do not cause the natural disasters that fish in the wild may be hit with.
There are some real positives to doing this. The fish will all come from the same conditions, they will be able to speak the same ‘language’. Often these seem to understand each other better than fish from different regions, even though all the species may be several generations removed from the wild.
The negatives are all to do with the amount of work it takes. Firstly there can be a lot of research needed, and added to that the parameter readings you can get from a river today may not be the readings from 100, 50 or even 10 years ago. This is the reason many species or extinct or struggling to survive in their changing habitats.
Next can be finding the fish from those regions, and especially the plants. There are only a few hundred plants commonly available in the hobby, and many of these are closely related to each other. Now you are slipping down a rabbit hole. Do you use the exact hardscape you can find in that habitat, or will any old granite do, the trees that may lose their leaves aren’t sold anywhere, so do you find something similar? How silty can you go before you can’t actually see the fish?
The good news is no one is testing you at the end of this, you can go as close to the biotope as you want. I’ve had setups where the fish are from the same river, but at least one species would have been from the wrong side of the river, and in reality unlikely to have ever come across the others in the wild. But there would have been a similar fish in the biotope. Plantwise I am normally happy if they’re from the same landmass, sometimes the same side of the map. But this is the great thing you can go as detailed as you like. Just once you start looking at flights to that location and planning a trip there to make sure your set-up is accurate, maybe you’ve gone too far. Although if you do go, share your results with the rest of us pretty please.
Keep checking back for some biotope ideas, and let us know what biotopes you’re looking at on our socials.
