Biota Studio was founded by Adrian S., who spent his early childhood in Fiji turning over logs and rocks in search of frogs and lizards. He moved to Australia at six, and the searching didn’t stop.

As a kid, Adrian would catch skinks in the garden. Before he’d keep one, he’d study the exact patch it came from: the soil, the leaf litter, the rocks it hid under, the plants overhead. Then he’d rebuild that small piece of garden in a tank, as closely as he could. Without knowing it, he was already doing what Biota Studio does today: recreating ecosystems, not just enclosures.

In 2017, Adrian started Biota as a small fish business, run from a tiny studio apartment in Dulwich Hill, NSW. Fish led to frogs, which are still his first love, and frogs led to reptiles.

In 2020 he built his first bioactive enclosure, not to sell but as a living display for his own home. Curious whether anyone else would want one, he listed it on Facebook Marketplace. It sold in 30 minutes.

One build became a shelf of them, then a room full. The studio apartment ran out of space long before we ran out of ideas, and it gave us our name: Biota Studio. In April 2022 we opened our first store in Surry Hills, Sydney.

We still build every enclosure the way Adrian rebuilt those patches of garden: study the place first, then recreate it as closely as we can.