Melanie

Okay, good news. I think I've found someone who will drive them to Spidersweb's house. :bounce:

My lack of a car is making any sort of sending really difficult. If I could get someone to pick them up and drop them at Spidersweb's house, that would work, too.

2 angels, 2 gourami, 6 tetra in one tank. 3 platys in the other.

See, if I had someone to go with me, it wouldn't be a problem. I wouldn't be begging for help on a public forum if I had people who could do this sort of thing for me. :oops: Right now, I have found a pet mover who can move them, but I need someone who would watch them until 15 February when she can move them. The person would have to bring the fish and their packaged-up tanks to: meeting point in wellington, Haywoods turnoff on the upper hutt side on the morning of the 15th feb at 7am.

Is the liquid ban domestic or just international. They're really mean about it on the international flights. I saw a girl get some Xmas snow globes taken off her while boarding. I would hate to lose my fish that way.

I'm flying. I don't think Air NZ is keen on fish moving.

I'll try that pets on the net service. My stuff is going through a depot, unfortunately, so I don't think the fish can come that way. After 2 years living in NZ, couriers remain a mystery to me. I have yet to get a courier to come to my house to pick up anything and when I ask over the phone, they start talking to me as though I've just told them I've sprouted an extra head.

I'm trying to move from Wellington to Hamilton but haven't figured out how to get the fish there. Does anyone know how to move fish? I haven't driven for 2 years so I'm trying to find a service or some way to get the fish to Hamilton without my having to drive. Any suggestions?

His tank is 366 litres and he has discus, some corys (2 I think), one of those big sucker fish, and probably a few other things I've forgotten about. I don't remember what tank lights he has, the problem seems to have been a big old window in his house that didnt have a shade. It now has one. I'll pass this all along to him. I was worried, however, that such a huge water change would set the tank on a cycle and kill his fish. Oh and I'm a real plant person. My tanks are like fish jungles. He never has been one for plants, not sure why. I suggest it to him every now and then, but he never seems keen on it.

A friend has a rather large tank and has recently had a change in his water quality. He has lots of algae on the sides, lots on rocks and the fake plants in his tank--he doesn't have live plants in his tank. And the water is also very cloudy. So far, he added Cycle to his water in case the cloudiness is because of a mini cycle. He changes 10-15% of his water every 2nd week. He also added an algae killer. He also bought a shade to keep sunlight out of the fish room to kill the algae. This was all in the past 48 hours or so and now his water has gotten worse and he now wants to change like 90 percent of it, and/or clean all the gear from the tank and do a 15% water change daily until it clears. He has artesian water with no chemicals. Any suggestions?

Genetic weakness could make the fish more succeptible to disease, but there has got to be some sort of infectuous agent that begins the outbreaks of disease. Otherwise I don't understand how adding a new fish to a tank could set off an outbreak.

The first site I read said to hit it with a fish antibiotic. I hear they're only available through the vet in NZ. I am so tempted to fill my suitcase with Maracyn and Maracyn-II before I come back home from the U.S., but I really don't want to have to attempt to explain to Customs why I felt the need to import half a suitcase of fish antibiotics.

When I kept guppies in the States, we never had a heater and it was fine. However, we had central heat, so the house was never really cold. Before you get more guppies, observe them in the store. A lot of the guppies in the States and in NZ right now have this guppy disease. Visit the shop and watch the fish, then visit again a few days later. If 3/4 of THEIR fish are dead, that's a bad sign. And I just got a heater for cheap at Petland. Petland is a good place to buy heaters, but the conditions in their fish tanks are kind of scary.

I think that we need to make some distinctions here in order to continue intelligently. Before I experienced this new guppy disease, one of the reasons I denied its existence was that nobody has compiled a set list of symptoms. Because of this, every single guppy problem in the book seemed to get labelled "guppy AIDS." Is it possible we're talking about two different things here? (As in, if you're not having a massive die-off, perhaps you don't have this disease in your tanks and are just experiencing a guppy who has genetic deficits?)

My fish, which I know came from the same two sources as yours, were infected with whatever this is. Someone agreed to look after my fish and put mine in with theirs, even though I advised them against it because I'd had problems with the disease. Theirs got it and died within a week. They lost 55 fish in that week, which is abnormal for this person because they'd only lost 7 fish this year until adding my fish to the mix. I think that's about as scientific as you're going to get from me, but if you read the article I linked, the writer managed to infect his healthy fish simply using water from an infected tank. I'm not saying there is no genetic component to it. I'm sure there is. I think that everything Pegasus said here is probably true, but that unlike MS, there's some sort of infectious component that sets things off. I just have no idea what kind of infectious agent it would be. When the onset of the disease began in my tank, I had not added a new fish, any new plants or snails, or anything but water for over 3 months.