News / native fish
Build a Planted Riparium!
Visit the Aqua Verdi/Riparium Supply site, subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch our Facebook page for tips, new products and design ideas you can use to build a beautiful, relatively easy-care ecosystem display.
The attached photograph shows a Central America/Mexico biotope riparium in a 50-gallon tank. Plants include Acorus Japanese Sweetflag, Acrostichum Leather Fern and Ruellia Dwarf Bluebell.
Use this coupon code in the Aqua Verdi store for a 15% discount on riparium planters and other items in our Dry Goods Collection...
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New Riparium Plants - 23 March
We have received a new plant order from one of our suppliers and it includes some really excellent material, including selections that we have not listed in a while and others that are new for our online store.
We have received quite a few inquiries about Acrostichum Leather Fern (1) and we are pleased to have them in stock again. This is a striking swamp fern for larger plantings and can even growing in mildly brackish water. It looks especially good in combination with mangrove trees. It will grow very well in the Riparium Supply, Riparium Planter Grand.
A botanically-interesting species, Anemopsis Yerba Mansa (2) has a range restricted to the Western United States where it grows in sunny, marshy areas. It bears unique foliage and blooms.
Spilanthes Toothache Plant (3) blooms with frequent compound flowers resembling thimbles. This marsh plant from South America grows to just a few inches tall and might be a good choices for nano riparium plantings.
Cyperus Dwarf Umbrella Sedge (4) is a versatile and easy-to-grow riparium plant that works especially well as grassy background foliage repeated in several riparium planters.
Saururus Lizard's Tail (5), a plant relative of Anemopsis Yerba Mansa, is a bushy herbaceous native to Eastern North America. It looks good with many other kinds of riparium plants.
Stay tuned! We'll have more updates on the way for these new plants and more!
New fish in the mail!
We received some excellent new fish in the mail with an order from the native North American specialty online store, www.ZimmermansFish.com. It's a lot of fun to receive new shipped livestock or plants, and even better when they show up 100% alive as perfect specimens.
These two species will work as centerpieces for a couple of new planted biotope setups representing aquatic ecosystems in the Southern United States. We ordered the bantam sunfish (Lepomis symmetricus) as a group of small adult individuals. This small sunfish (to only ~4") is relatively peaceful and and can be housed in a relatively small enclosure with just a few individuals. Most other Lepomis species are more feisty and should be kept in larger groups to disperse aggression.
The Bantam Sunfish has a rather limited geographic range that includes a few areas in Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Illinois. We will use the 56-gallon tank that has previously housed a group of species Betta to develop a riparium planting as their habitat biotope. The plant combination will make a few compromises with plants that aren't necessarily from the species' range, but it will create the general appearance of the Bantam Sunfish's densely-vegetated, quiet freshwater habitats: these include river oxbows, swamps, ponds and shallow bays of larger lakes.
Tjhe following link directs to the FishBase.org page for Bantam Sunfish:
FishBase.org: Lepomis symmetricus Forbes, 1883
Japanese Sweetflag (Acorus gramineus) is among the best of riparium plants for recreating a grassy riverbank or lake shore. This plant will fill several of the planters as background foliage, with a few other selections mixed in for variety and biotope representation. Mexican Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) is an easy to grow riparium plant that might occur in some of the same places as the Bantam Sunfish. We also have a couple seedling specimens of the swamp-dwelling Dwarf Palmetto (Sabal minor), a characteristic Southeast US plant. Tall Bluebell (Ruellia brittoniana) would be another good plant to include.
The older photograph linked below shows a 50-gallon tank planted in this manner as a riparium with Japanese Sweetflag and a few other selections.
While it is an easy grower, Japanese Sweetflag requires a little extra care for planting. It is not a true grass and it grows from a creeping rhizome, similar to the habit of aquarium Anubias plants, that should be positioned right at the substrate surface during planting. The following sequence of photos shows the preferred planting method with the Aqua Verdi Riparium Planter.
In a week or two we will write another post with background information and biotope design ideas for our second new fish species, Redeye Bass (Micropterus coosae). Stay tuned!
