Also in the editorial office of Collater.al during the Christmas period one of the most common rituals among offices and companies of friends took place, the Secret Santa. This is not the occasion to explain the reasons why the writer chose to give a colleague a goldfish, it is sufficient to add that the job title of this colleague is “videomaker”, with references to an Italian TV series set on the set of another very Italian TV series.
Anyway, as soon as the fish was introduced, the problem arose of finding him/her (how do you recognise the sex of a goldfish? They say the shape of the fins, it will be) a house, an aquarium that was not a sterile spherical claustrophobic bowl. The following day Spigola (gender neutral?) had a cube of water with a nice bottom of real stones, two plants and the wreck of a Volkswagen bulli. It seemed like a decent home, until I saw the aquariums designed for the International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest, the world championship for aquariums with plants.

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The competition is now in its twenty-first year, involving 127 participants selected from over 2600 entries from all over the world. Contestants include enthusiasts from all walks of life, who take up to six months to design their thousand-euro installations, which strike a balance between nature and creativity. As if they were set designers, the aquaculturists recreate every inch of the underwater landscape with tweezers where the length of the plants and the realism of the set-up, and the way it is photographed, makes the difference in winning the €7600 prize money.
The ten judges of the competition take into account not only the creative and beautiful component of the aquariums, but also aspects more related to fish life such as the balance of the ecosystem. Fish species are important, but they must be able to live in harmony with the environment, where the chemical properties of the water are an indispensable criterion.

The International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest (IAPLC) takes place in Japan and is the brainchild of Takashi Amano, a photographer who has been travelling through the forests of Brazil and Gabon since the 1970s to shoot nature-related photo series. His passion and desire to recreate those landscapes led him to delve into traditional Japanese gardening techniques, which he then brought underwater with maximum realism. Amano’s latest work, which has since become a cult figure for thousands of enthusiasts, was produced in 2015 for Oceanário de Lisboa. 160 tonnes of water, a 40-metre long tank with 20 tonnes of volcanic stones, 46 species of plants and 10,000 tropical fish, who knows how well Seabass would look.