Aquascaping

When it comes to aquariums, I never got much beyond the round goldfish bowl to hold little Goldie that I won at the school fair. This was usually followed by the water becoming murky, and ultimately the flushing of poor little Goldie. I guess if you're spending $20K on a professionally aquascaped setup, though, you might not be flushing Goldie so quickly.

Aquascaping "is a wonderful approach because it creates a balanced system," Wood said. "On the one hand, it's extremely sophisticated, in that it closely replicates a natural ecosystem - on the other, you don't need a lot of chemicals, nutrients or other extraneous stuff. The components are basically simple - rocks, driftwood, plants and a few species of fish, most of which are relatively inexpensive."

Some of the tanks are as large as 160 gallons, and seem to provide a portal into a tropical river or lake. Rocks and driftwood are arranged to create grottoes, interspersed with light-dappled open areas. Various mosses, grasses and stemmed plants grow at different levels, contributing further to the illusion of depth. The painstaking placement of the tank's rocks, wood and plants essentially creates a rich array of microhabitats, each attracting different species of fish and crustaceans.

Apparently Crystal Bee Shrimp are a big attraction.

The shrimp are also a source of obsession for some breeders and collectors. To the untrained eye, they all look like multicolored crustaceans. But, as with koi, the patterns mean everything, Steven Lo said. "Some are only a few dollars each, some go up to $1,000," Lo said. "It all depends on color variation."

The plants are as important as the fish in an Aqua Forest tank, and the brothers sell roughly 300 varieties of vegetation. The "forest," in fact, must be grown to maturity in a tank before fish and shrimp are stocked - a process that requires from four to six weeks of meticulous planting, fertilizing and pruning. Continuing vegetation care is also requisite.

I suppose if you can afford one of these things, you can also afford to have someone maintain it.