Each of these lush landscapes looks like a photo taken in the vast wilds of Middle-earth, but they’re actually incredibly awesome aquariums. It’s been a year since we first discovered the world of competitive aquarium design, aka aquascaping, and the winners of the 2015 International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest (IAPLC) have just been announced.
Currently a nascent art form (begun in the 90s), aquascaping involves the painstaking arrangement of aquatic plants, rocks, driftwood, and other hardscape elements in massive tanks that take years to prepare. It’s underwater ornamental gardening, sometimes with fish as garden residents.
“The art of aquascaping is still a fledgling endeavor, first started in the 90s by Japanese wildlife photographer Takashi Amano. The annual IAPLC competition has grown dramatically since, with the 2015 contest seeing 2,545 entries from 69 countries. Japan, China, Brazil, and France dominate the top finalist spots (only 13 entries were from the United States).”
Japan’s Takayuki Fukada was the 2015 IAPLC grand prize winner with this beautiful aquarium entitled “Longing”:
Visit Colossal for additional photos and to learn more about the art of competitive aquascaping.
we never really covered the 2015 IAPLC – so here is something about it. After the death of Takashi Amano there was some speculations if his company will continue to organise and sponsor the probably highest profile competition of global aquascaping. Now, it seems they will, the announcement for the 2016 contest was made recently.
Mycena Interrupta, also known as Pixie’s Parasol, is a small non-bioluminescent mushroom found in and around Australia. It’s very fragile and grows in small colonies on rotting wood, primarily in temperate, rainy areas. It is the only blue Mycena.
If you accidentally get transformed into a fly, and get caught in a Venus flytrap, here is some valuable advice: Don’t panic.
“If you just sit there and wait, the next morning, the trap will open and you can leave,” says Ranier Hedrich from the University of Würzburg. “It you panic, you induce a deadly cycle of disintegration.”
Hedrich
and others have found that the Venus flytrap can count the number of
times that its victims touch the sensory hairs on its leaves. One touch
does nothing. Two closes the trap. Three primes the trap for digestion.
And five, according to Hedrich’s latest study,
triggers the production of digestive enzymes—and more touches mean more
enzymes. The plant apportions its digestive efforts according to the
struggles of its prey. And the fly, by fighting for its life, tells the
plant to start killing it, and how vigorously to do so.
