JBL Biotope Aquarium World Championship in Russia

Once again in 2014 the best biotope scapers of the world met up in St. Petersburg to set up live biotope aquariums which then were judged by a renowned jury. Each of the five finalists had won the qualifying tournament for a biotope region of the world: Victor Ortiz from Mexico for biotopes of North and Central America, Ivan Frank of Croatia for biotopes of South America, Svetlana Kirillova from Russia for biotopes in Africa, Vyasechlav Veriga from Russia for biotopes of Asia and Petra Basic from Croatia for Australian Pacific biotopes. The preliminary decision was based on submitted photos which were judged by a jury consisting of the following people: Heiko Bleher (Italy), Benjamin Hamann (Germany), Jeremy Gay (England), Andre Longarco (Brasilia), Heiko Blessin (Germany), Michael Salter (Canada), Ivan Mikolji (Venezuela), Victor Mihai (Romania) und Alexey Malyshev (Russia).

On 26 November the final started in the exhibition halls of the Zoospere in St.Petersburg. All participants had a large selection of their favoured decoration materials at the ready as well as plants suitable for the biotope, and started their biotope scaping. Under the fascincated gaze of 30,000 visitors at the fair, fascinating and unbelievably life-like habitats from the five regions of the earth came to life within one day. Using JBL external filters or the dedicated fine filter floss JBL SymecMicro the water was already clear by the second day and the water dwellers could be added. On the third day the animals felt so comfortable that they were already mating and in one case even spawned. Also on the third day came the jury evaluation. JBL’s Heiko Blessin was present and was able to take photos of the aquariums and email them, along with some videos, to his jury colleagues. The jury was unanimous that it had never been confronted with such a uniformly high level of biotope aquariums before.

1st place

It was especially difficult to decide between Svetlana’s Africa biotope and Petra’s Australia biotope for first place. Petra from Croatia just managed to win the lead against her Russian colleague Svetlana by a few points. Her attention to detail was simply unbeatable: She even had glued plants on pieces of bark and placed them on the “bare” branches in the overwater section. Despite the fact that the overwater section was NOT part of the assessment!

One fine detail could be observed almost everywhere: The leaves (JBL Nano-Catappa) used to simulate the foliage at the bottom of the water were shaped with scissors into an abundance of shapes, and were sometimes even reduced to a skeleton structure of the leaf. It can’t get more lifelike than that.

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