What is a Biotope?

A biotope is a geographical region that has a uniform biological environment that contains a specific community of plants and animals.  The concept is similar to that of a habit, which is a natural environment in which a specific plant or animal species exists.  So the main difference is that a biotope by definition contains a community rather than just one species.  Biotopes also do not have to be naturally occurring.

Within tropical fishkeeping, we can recreate an environment where a community of fish and plants would exist in the wild.  Although the majority of fish in the aquarium trade are bred in captivity, there are still advantages in recreating as natural environment as possible which not only contains the same water chemistry, temperature and make-up that its ancestors would have encountered but also the same flora and fauna that the particular fish has evolved to deal with and enable it to exhibit behaviors close to those it would exhibit in nature.

Not only is a biotope favourable for the fish but in my opinion it is also an interesting project for the fishkeeper.  Researching the natural environments of the fish is an interesting hobby and attempting to recreate these habitats is a fun challenge.

In this website I will attempt to identify some of the main biotopes in Malaysia, identify which fish would both live in those biotopes and not get predated by the other fish, and give some ideas of which plants, substrates, leaves etc can be used to recreate the natural look and feel of that particular biotope.  I will also give some ideas of how to care for those fish and provide some background information on each of the species used.