‘Botanicals’ is a word that’s only joined the aquarium lexicon quite recently. So what does it mean, and what should you know about botanical use?
I FIRST STARTED PLAYING with botanicals in late 2018, after coming across some pictures online of a tank with a simple layout—a few bits of tangled wood and loads of leaves with various brown tones, all scattered on top of the substrate with a few twigs and round, brown ‘things’. On enquiring, I discovered it wasn't just a simple layout after all. The leaves were a mix of oak, catappa (Indian almond), and magnolia, with some oak twigs. As for the round, brown ‘things’, it transpired that these were Cariniana seed pods laying atop a thin layer of play sand—and they weren’t in the tank solely for decoration.
The main reason aquarists use botanicals is to 'copy nature' and replicate a particular kind of wilderness environment. We use an array of leaves, seed pods, and cones for their aesthetic appeal, but a lot of us also want the ‘tea stained’ water (though it’s important to remember that you do get clear water rivers, streams and lakes that contain botanicals), plus the biofilm growth, and algae and detritus—these last two can be valuable food sources for our tank inhabitants.
Better still, if you allow the 'ugly' side—the biofilm growth and detritus—to build up, and let nature it slowly run its course, you will eventually culture a natural food web of organisms from microbes upwards, which in turn stimulate your fishes’ natural hunting behaviours. You may also be creating spawning conditions (depending on the fish keep), in terms of either water chemistry, layout, or both; which is a reward in itself.
Botani-what?
Botanicals are organic in origin, and are derived from plants and trees. Historically speaking, humans have used botanicals over thousands of years for a myriad of reasons. They may carry a scent, or a flavour, or may even therapeutic properties—there are, after all, some 400,000 species of plants in the world, and the medical benefits of many are known.
While many of these ‘human use’ botanicals are well studied and documented, the formal research on aquarium-use botanicals is still fledgling, and largely revolves around what aquarists would class as the ‘classic’ selection: catappa (from Terminalia catappa); oak (from the Quercus genus); alder cones (from Alnus glutinosa); and magnolia (from the Magnolia genus).
For the modern aquarist, the choi
