Start here
Start with a jar, local stone, and plants already on a Yerevan shelf.
Aquascaping can begin with a small container and a few well-chosen living things. These eight starting points keep the first setup simple, affordable, and suited to life in Armenia.
You can start with a three-liter jar for about 12,000 AMD. Plan for about 10 to 15 minutes of care a week1.
Two spoons of river sediment, three dead leaves, water from the same place, a kitchen jar and a square of cotton. Nothing is stocked and nothing is bought. Ostracods and bdelloid rotifers hatch out of ditch sediment under exactly these conditions, and were still emerging at the fourth weekly count2.
Oxygen crosses the surface, so supply follows area and demand follows volume. Divide through and the volume cancels. Only the mean depth is left: at or below about 0.40 m an unaerated container recovers its oxygen inside a single summer night3. Reducing depth is free. A pump is not.
Of the 34 materials in the hardscape catalog, 17 can only be imported, 5 are sold in Yerevan and 12 are collectable in Armenia4. Six of the twelve are recorded as inert: basalt, volcanic scoria, lava rock, volcanic tuff, obsidian and pumice4, and they are construction materials here rather than aquarium products. Two of the twelve must never go in a tank4, and the hardscape page names them and gives the field signs.
Of the 110 species in the livestock catalog, 17 are recorded as needing no heater5, which in a heated Yerevan flat means an unheated tank sitting at 19 to 23 degrees. That is a keeping temperature rather than a compromise, and it takes a heater, and the power to run it all winter, off the list before anything is bought.
Before buying plants, ask in local aquarium groups for spare cuttings. Someone else's tank trim can help you start your own little garden. Find plants to share or buy.
Calcite stops dissolving once the water saturates. With no injected carbon dioxide that ceiling is about 3 dGH and 3 dKH; under injection it is about 10 and 107. Water already harder than the ceiling is not hardened by the rock at all. The thing the hobby warns hardest about turns out to have a bound, and the bound is a small one.
Local stone, standard lighting, simple filtration, and hardy plants are enough to make a beautiful planted tank. The Armenian shops guide collects the useful local range in one place, while imported specialty brands remain an optional extra.8
Try a pond-life jar, explore six simple setups, or grow a windowsill tank. Want company? Join the club.
Why this exists
Armenia deserves an aquascaping reference shaped around its own water, stone, plants, and seasons.
You can explore decades of aquarium ideas in The Aquatic Gardener, published since 1985. Its list of articles is free to browse.9 Here, you can also learn about Yerevan tap water, local stone, Lake Sevan, and places to find plants.
We want to make all of this easier to learn about in Armenian.
The Aquatic Gardener, 1985 to 20269
- 41
- years in print
- 163
- issues, every one with a PDF
- 1,228
- articles to explore
- 318
- writers
- 49
- articles by Takashi Amano
Discover Lake Sevan
A hundred years of discovery, on one lake.
Explore Lake Sevan's plants, water, and wildlife through 356 free research papers, published from 1927 to 202310. Here are three places to start.
Where do moss and stoneworts grow in Lake Sevan? Explore a 1951 study of these underwater plants and the depths where they thrive.
Daphnia are tiny water animals eaten by fish. A 1957 study explores how to raise them.
Meet the small, shrimp-like animals called gammarids in a 1948 study of their lives in Lake Sevan.
Explore all 356 Lake Sevan papers. Search by topic or author, then download a paper to read. English titles help you browse the original Russian papers.
The library
What would you like to explore?
Styles and history
Iwagumi, Nature Aquarium, Dutch, biotope, jungle, Walstad and Wabi-Kusa. Where each came from, and which of its rules survive checking.
Competitions and winners
IAPLC, the AGA contest, the biotope contests. 117 verified placings, 94 named aquascapers,11 a profile only where the official record carries real detail.
Materials and water chemistry
Seiryu, Dragon stone, Ohko, lava, Elephant Skin. Substrate, carbon dioxide, light, filtration. KH, GH, and what the nitrogen cycle is really doing.
Livestock and where it comes from
Fish, shrimp, snails and plants, each with the river system it is native to, the trade route it arrives by, and whether it is wild caught or farmed.
The Armenian scene
Gazanik, Aquaman, Aquavita. What can be bought here and what has to be carried in. Lake Sevan, the rivers, and the native species list.
Reading
Find your next book or explore an article. Free-to-read papers are clearly marked.
For children
Two versions of everything. One a five year old can follow while an adult reads aloud, one a third grader can read alone.
Sources and references
Every page has one. Title, author, publication, year, address, date read. Where hobby and evidence disagree, both are cited.
Buying in Armenia
If you want to buy something this week, open the shops directory.
It is a list of doors to knock on, and the most practical page here. Three map databases reconciled into one table: 849 places across twenty cities, each with a district and a trade against it.15 Filter it to your own district and what comes back is a list you can walk in an afternoon.
A script built it, so it tells you where a shop is listed rather than whether it is any good. That is the division of labour: the directory gives you the doors, and the community page gives you the few somebody has already walked through.
The people
Find people who love plants and aquariums.
Ask a question, swap cuttings, or find a secondhand tank. Start with Armenia's aquarium community on Facebook16, or join a Russian-speaking plant community on Telegram with chats for aquariums, terrariums, selling, and swapping.
Want a Telegram invite? Send us a message on Instagram and we can help you join.
The proposal
A club is people who know each other, and in a country this size that is the thing we can actually do.
People who meet, argue about plants and pass cuttings across a table. Out of that come two things: one tank built together and entered into a world contest, and a photograph strand with rules you can hold your own photograph up against tonight. The whole proposal is on the club page, including the part that starts with a tank you already own and a phone you already own.
Open question
Armenian aquascapers are already shaping the language of the hobby.
Three clear forms are in use today.12 Each suits a different setting, from formal writing to an easy conversation in a shop.
Descriptive compound. Water landscape design. What an official body would reach for in a formal document.
Colloquial. Aquarium design. What is actually said in shops and between hobbyists, and the reason it will probably win.
Direct loanword, transliterated. Used by dedicated aquascapers online. Precise, unambiguous, and borrowed.
The hub uses all three, marks which is which, and will publish its reasoning before it picks one. The vocabulary note
Peter Kirwan’s Mountainscape: a whole landscape built from stone, plants, and open water. Photo credits
The first Armenian competition entry can begin here.
The IAPLC and Aquatic Gardeners Association archives show how entrants around the world frame, photograph, and present their work.1411 The competition guide turns those examples into a practical route from a finished tank to a submitted photograph.
- Costed setup models. Six low-effort models, each with a container, a water volume, a mean depth, a re-oxygenation time constant, a stocking budget, an equipment list, a weekly minute range, a total cost in AMD and a failure mode. The smallest, a three litre jar, totals about 12,000 AMD at 10 to 15 minutes a week. Prices marked verified were read from the shop’s own product pages; anything marked an estimate is ours, and allow about 10 to 15 minutes a week for routine care; your setup and routine may vary Set out in full, with the physics and the failure modes, on easy keeping.
- Trujillo, J., Schwing, C.D., Muturi, E.J. and Cáceres, C.E. (2023). Heterocypris incongruens maintains an egg bank in stormwater habitats and influences the development of larval mosquito, Culex restuans. Ecology and Evolution 13(8): e10445. Open access. The hatching protocol, the taxa recovered from ditch sediment, and the emergence still running at the fourth weekly count. DOI 10.1002/ece3.10445. Used on the pond jar. open access
- Our own reaeration arithmetic. Not a published source. The two-film expression for gas exchange, divided through by volume and rewritten in terms of mean depth, so that the rate constant is k over d and volume cancels. The 0.40 m threshold is the depth at which the time constant falls below the length of a summer night at the middle of the published range for the gas transfer velocity. That velocity is a published range for small sheltered water bodies rather than a measurement of an actual container, which is why the page states the whole range rather than one figure. Working, tables and inputs on easy keeping and the physics page. calculated, repeatable, unverified by a third party
- The hub’s own hardscape materials dataset. Thirty four materials, each with a geology, an effect on GH and KH, a confidence level and an Armenian availability field: 17 import only, 5 sold in Yerevan, 12 collectable in the country. Six of the twelve are recorded as inert, and two, sulphide mineralised rock and rock salt, carry a never verdict. Set out with the naming traps, the contamination map and the field signs on find a hardscape.
- The hub’s own livestock and plant catalogues. : 110 species, of which 17 are recorded as needing no heater, 76 as needing one, and 17 where the field is not yet filled. : 93 plants, of which 34 are recorded as stocked at Gazanik, 20 of those carry the shop’s own price, and 15 of the 34 are recorded as needing no injected carbon dioxide. Both files carry per-record source lists and are published with the site. See find a fish and find a plant.
- Our own calcite ceiling calculation. Not a published source. The standard calcite carbonate equilibrium system solved at 25 degrees C for a fixed dissolved carbon dioxide, charge balance 2[Ca2+] = [HCO3-], with activity corrections ignored. At air equilibrium, 420 ppm, it returns 19.4 mg/L calcium and 2.7 dGH; the injected rows are fixed at a dissolved concentration and give about 10 dGH and 10 dKH. Hardness rises as the cube root of carbon dioxide, so the result is insensitive to the atmospheric figure. Working, constants and validation on find a hardscape and the chemistry page. calculated, repeatable, unverified by a third party
- the Armenian retail survey, . The shop by shop read behind the finding that no ADA, Tropica, Chihiros, Seachem, Twinstar, UNS, Aquario, Do!Aqua or 2Hr Aquarist product could be found stocked anywhere in the country, together with the local range that is stocked instead. Absence of evidence is reported as absence of evidence: this is what the survey could establish, not a proof that no unit exists. Set out in full on the Armenian scene.
- The Aquatic Gardener complete index, 1985 to 2026. Aquatic Gardeners Association, its published index of issues and articles. 163 issues, 318 authors, 1,228 article entries, 495 keywords, 49 entries under Takashi Amano, and zero returns for Armenia, Caucasus, Sevan, Georgia, Turkey or Iran. Counted for the reading page. counted 8 September 2026
- Our Lake Sevan literature list. from arar.sci.am, the Pan-Armenian Digital Library of the National Academy of Sciences. Twenty-nine searches, twenty-eight of them in Russian Cyrillic, then a record by record read of the archive block holding the research station’s transactions. The station date of 1923 and the chain of institutions come from the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydroecology’s own history page. Every count here is recomputed from the data file at build time by . Set out in full, with what it does not contain, on the Sevan archive page. compiled 9 September 2026
- The hub’s verified placings dataset. 117 placings and 94 named aquascapers, counted directly from the official contest records: the AGA showcase archive, the AGA 2025 results, the IAPLC Grand Prize archive and gallery, the CIPS CIAC result announcements and the JBL report on BADC 2015. Published with the site data so the count can be checked. 8 September 2026
- Armenian Translations for Aquascaping, supplied directly and not published online, together with bararan.am and the Nayiri dictionary corpus. Establishes that the Language Committee has published no Armenian term for aquascaping and that neither lexicon carries an entry. Set out in full on the Armenian glossary. checked 8 September 2026
- IAPLC2021 World Ranking Announcement, IAPLC news, Aqua Design Amano, 28 August 2021. iaplc.com/e/2021/08/28/results21/. The all-time record entry year: 2,617 entries from 84 countries and areas, with the country list this hub searched for Armenia. Cross-checked against the AGA showcase archive, which records no Armenian entrant either. accessed 8 September 2026
- The hub’s own merged places directory.
{city}-merged.json, one file per city, read 9 September 2026, each reconciling that city’s Google, Yandex and OpenStreetMap records without overwriting any of them. The 849 places across twenty cities, and the 113 of them corroborated by more than one database, are counted from these files. A record says where a place is listed, not that anybody has visited it. Set out in full on the shops directory. - Ակվարիումիստների Ակումբ Հայաստանում / Клуб Аквариумистов Армении. About 7,900 members, Armenian and Russian, active through 2026. Public group metadata only; the posts were not read. facebook.com/groups/AquariumistClubArmenia Set out on community and shops. read 9 September 2026
Continue
Where to go next.
Easy setups
Five setups worth copying, four of which need no heater, no filter and no air pump. The shortest route from reading to owning.
Materials and water
The carbonate system, Yerevan tap water by district, and what a rock does to it. Everything else on this site rests on this page.
Find a fish
One hundred and ten species with real minimum volumes, filterable on the three numbers that decide a first tank.
The Armenian scene
What is actually available in this country, what the law says, and what the water out of the tap in your district is like.