Litter your tank with our new Catappa Indian Almond Botanical Combo!

The botanicals in this pack are perfect for invertebrates and black water setups. This curated collection of Catappa Indian Almond Tree Botanicals will meet the hopes and dreams of your aquatic friends!

This Botanical Pack Includes:

3 Catappa Bark
3 Catappa Fruit
4 Catappa Leaves

Each botanical offers unique attributes that will support the health of your fish and invertebrates!

The Catappa Tree (Terminalia catappa) is a large tropical tree in the leadwood tree family & provides many healthy additions to your aquarium. Its bark, like its leaves and fruits, provides many healthy benefits to your tank. It has antibacterial properties that are beneficial to fish and invertebarates, especially when newly introduced.

From providing a supplemental food source to providing tannins and humic acids to the tank, the bark and fruit can also support slime coat production and help prevent infections. Furthermore, it provides more surface area for animals such as shrimp without having to increase the tank size. In the nano aquarium, a variety of invertebrates (such as shrimp, snails, crabs, and crayfish) and fish will greatly appreciate the refuge of Catappa Bark as well as the natural benefits that it offers. Catappa Bark and Fruit is very useful with fish that thrive in blackwater and acidic habitats, such as Discus and Bettas.

Catappa Leaves are ideal leaf litter for blackwater tanks as well as many other setups, providing shelter to fry and small species of shrimp, crabs, crayfish, snails, and fish while maintaining a natural look in the aquarium. They also serve as an ideal growth medium for biofilm and diatoms, both of which are key food sources to countless aquatic animal species, including shrimp and other invertebrates as well as fish.

Catappa Leaves also have buffering qualities. As they decompose, they release tannins (tercatin, punicalin, punicalagin) that lower the pH of the aquarium, but at a gradual rate. This is particularly beneficial for aquatic animals that require acidic, low-pH water. Catappa Leaves can also be used sparingly in high-pH setups as well, especially when their pH-lowering quality is counteracted with pH-raising decor such as lace rock and dried coral.

Catappa Leaves have extremely valuable theraputic qualities and can often serve as a harmless preventative medicine in the aquarium. They are highly anti-bacterial and anti-fungal and support or increase slime coat, scale, and shell production in fish and invertebrates. This is particularly crucial during the introduction and acclimation of animals to the aquarium and after water changes.

Our Catappa Fruit is sourced from 100% pesticide and chemical-free areas and is safe to add directly to the aquarium. This fruit can be allowed to fully decompose in the aquarium. We recommend that it be added sparingly at first in order to ensure no drastic changes in water parameters or excessive tanning of water.

For Individual Purchases Please Refer to our Botanical Page!

For the safety of our animals, we only ship live fish, crabs, and select other inverts exclusively via UPS 1 Day Air. If your order contains this item, you will only see UPS 1 Day Air as a shipping option during checkout. If other items are in your cart that can ship with 2 day or standard shipping options the only shipping method you can still select is UPS 1 Day Air.

UPS 1 Day is a description of the duration of time a shipment will spend in transit once it has been shipped. This does not guarantee the package will be shipped the same or next day from which the order was placed.

Shipping Schedule for this service

UPS 1 Day: Monday through Thursday

Current Handling Time:

1-9 business days

Here at Aquatic Arts, we consider the welfare of the live animals we are shipping to be of the foremost importance. This process is much more involved than simply creating a shipping label and affixing it to a box. Depending on the order, it takes from 4 to 7 people to complete this process properly. We check the weather conditions here where they fly out of the Indianapolis UPS facility and the destination for each shipment. We start early each morning and go through a multi-step process to have the day's shipments prepared in time for the UPS pickup. The volume of orders in our system also affects the processing time. Therefore our stated handling time is 1-9 business days.

Shipping Rate

Pricing is by size of package needed to fill entire order and distance it must travel. It will be calculated at checkout.