About Us

Welcome to Blackwater Aquariums.

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by nature growing up around nature and constantly being outside, it started as a kid collecting leaves and sticks to put in my ant colony.  As my fulltime job as a chef we used to have a dish on the menu that involved yabbies, one day I found a tiny Yabby on the bottom of our box of yabbies. Seeing that this little guy was to small to be eaten anyway, I decided to take him home and care for him. This is how my passion for the Aquatic world began. 1 Tiny fish tank grew to a 3ft and a few 2ft tanks, this soon grew to breeding 14 pairs of Apistogramma and setting up a couple racks! You get it I got the bug the MTS (multiple tank syndrome) is strong in this one.

The breeding of Dwarf cichlid species soon got me interested in Blackwater Aquariums, this because they mimic the exact environment of the Amazon and other South American biotopes. Unfortunately for me finding botanicals to create this style of biotope in Australia seemed a bit harder, as many if not all stores that would sell the goods are located outside of Australia. And because we have a very strict biosecurity we are sort of limited to the standard Catappa IAL leaves.

This made me wonder what if we try some botanicals that can be sourced from Australia? Finding information or stories of people that have tried this before did not get me allot of information. This made me even more curious and decided to just give it a go and set up a few new tanks with nothing but a filter and a heater. These would become my test aquariums for all the botanicals I could source.

I decided to use Apistogramma as the fish for my experiment, the logic behind this was seeing that the can be a sensitive fish and if  they pass the test the botanical would be safe. As a double check however we also tested the botanicals on Cherry shrimp and Ramshorn snails. Only 3 aquariums available and quite a few botanicals to test made this quite a lengthy process.

After a few tries and errors we came up with our current selection and are quite happy with the results. We are always looking around for more options and the list of botanicals will keep expanding. We have the opinion that two know more than one so suggestions are always welcome.

Please have a look at our botanicals and have fun creating your Blackwater Aquarium.