IMO it is something that is very overrated in our hobby(and overlooked). At this point it's oh look i chucked some twigs and dead leaves and a few plants that aren't even found in the same habitat but since my fish are from the same continent(although they are found a few thousand kilometers apart and were never intended to live in the same habitat in nature) I think I've created a Biotope!!
I'm not one of those geograhical purists or a biotope enthusiast,just stating the obvious.
Your thoughts?
When I ask the magic box to define "biotope", the first answer that pops up is: "the region of a habitat associated with a particular ecological community".
When I specify more information from the Font Of All Human Knowledge...Wikipedia
...they add the following:
"Biotope is almost synonymous with the term 'habitat', which is more commonly used in English-speaking countries".
So it's relatively vague. The way we seem to use/abuse the word here on MFK is to refer to a collection of fish, and maybe plants, that originate in the same area in nature. Some folks only seem to worry about the fish, but give little thought to plants. Others, as you state in your post, seem to think a biotope can contain fish that live in far-removed different habitats on the same continent. There are aquarists who refer to their tanks as biotopes, but the tanks contain a mixture of plants and fish that were perhaps collected together, but half of which are invasives and not naturally found in that area originally.
Really, if you intend to be picky, a biotope should contain only fish, plants, substrate, wood, rocks, etc. that were all collected in exactly the same location. I wonder how many purists are that pure?
Personally, I keep fish together that require similar water conditions and temperatures, with little thought given to the fact that those similar water types may be from opposite sides of the globe. Plants? I try 'em out; the few species that live are the ones I keep. I hear occasionally that this practice might raise the risk of diseases spreading to species of fish that have little or no resistance to them. I'm sure this might be valid with wild-caught fish, but most of mine are captive-bred for multiple generations and I don't concern myself too much with the specific diseases their ancestors may or may not have been prone to.
My only "community" tank...there's another word that seems to paint a different picture to different people...contains cichlids from Uruguay, Goodeids from Mexico, barbs from SE Asia, two species of Garra from W Asia, catfish from Brazil, loaches from E Asia...it's a typically Canadian example of world-wide diversity.
I call it my Liberal Earth biotope tank...
