Pilgrimage, Shintaro Matsui, Japan.
No, these aren’t exactly your childhood goldfish bowls. The world of competitive aquarium design, oraquascaping, is just as difficult, expensive, and cutthroat as any other sport but requires expertise in many different fields to guarantee success. Aquarium designers possess large amounts of expertise in biology, design, photography, and excel in the art of patience, as individual aquascapes can take months if not years to fully mature into a completed landscape.
The world’s largest nature aquarium and aquatic plants layout competition is the International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest (IAPLC) which annually ranks hundreds of competitors from around the world with Asian and Eastern European countries generally dominating the top slots. While it’s somewhat difficult to track down galleries of winners from every year, here are some amazing entries from the last few years. To see more, oh so much more, check out: IAPLC Grand Prize Works, IAPLC 2012 Top 200 (or here), and the first Eastern European Planted Aquarium Design Contest.
Forest Scent, Pavel Bautin, Russia.
Pale Wind, Takayuki Fukada, Japan.
Whisper of the pines, Serkan Çetinkol, Turkey.
Verve!, Chow Wai Sun, Hong Kong.
Way to heaven, Dmitriy Parshin, Russia.
Wild West, Stjepan Erdeljić, Croatia.
Georgi Chaushev, Bulgaria.
Francisco Wu, Spain.
Long Tran Hoang, Vietnam.
ALK3R 
Wow! Too bad this is so far away, because it looks stunning!! True art!
Thank you for sharing so I can at least enjoy the pictures 🙂
Best,
Tieme
These are awesome…very soothing. Thanks for sharing.
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Reblogged this on Random Ramblings; Myriad Musings and commented:
These aqua-scapes are incredible! Beautiful…love the detail, creativity, and talent that went into these.
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