alanmin4304

If your rainwater is safe for you to drink it will be safe for the fish. If you add chlorine you will need to neutralize it. Chlorine in water reacts to form chloramines and other compounds which will need to be neutralized even after any chlorine has gone.

Once you have rinsed it all a bit you could add a little of one of the products available to neutralize chlorine in water.

Surely it will not be chemical free if you are using chlorinated water from the town supply.

A concrete floor will be good to stop escapes but may not be good for the shell. I would suggest you add a more suitable media over the concrete to avoid damage to the plastron

Others may not agree but that is what I would do.

Be aware that goldfish generally carry a lot of parasites but are usually ok with them if they are healthy to start with. These parasites would be transferred to your tropical and they will not handle them as well.

The male could have chucked them out prematurely and be guarding another lot of eggs.

You are suggesting that if all else fails read the instructions?

Does it cover freshwater and seawater?

Either guarding eggs or seriously considering the idea.

My understanding is that temperature determination of gender with reptiles like beardies takes place in the first 12 days of incubation so it maybe that to get both sexes feral is quite possible. Some people incubate eggs at the temperature they want to determine the sex they want then wind the temperature up to shorten the incubation time.

I used to breed a lot of angels in a previous life. If you wish to breed them please try to get ones with good genetics. It seems that at the moment people are prepared to breed any male to any female and there is a lot of rubbish out there. Also you will need bare tanks to put the breeding pairs in ---I used 600x300x300mm tanks, small tanks to hatch the eggs in --I used 150x150x150mm tanks for that then larger tanks to grow out the babies. Work out what you are going to do with the fish you breed---my biggest spawning was 1226 raised and sold, and they will breed every 10 days if you do it right. If you want to get a pair from younger ones start with 7 and be prepared to hold or dispose of the other 5. If you sell from home it is unlikely that a wholesaler or retailer will buy from you after you have destroyed the market for them by selling at the back door. The easiest to sell when I was doing it was black zebra lace veil tails but you might have to work towards creating them yourself. There are a few genetics about now that were not available when I was doing it so you may be able to start with some of them but you need to establish a reputation for having very good quality fish that are healthy and in good condition. Reputation is everything. I used to work with a friend and we were selling over 50000 fish a year to one wholesaler (who is no longer about). The genes in angel fish are in pairs so a marble should have two marble genes but may have gold as well ---If they only have one marble gene they do not look good. Do not cross a blusher (two stripeless genes) to a normal (two stripe genes). Read heaps and talk to people with knowledge and you will get on the right track. Good luck.

They are not one of the easiest to breed because the young are pretty small. I would suggest you start with danios---either zebra or leopard and see how you go with them.

Discuss are not the best fish for a beginner, particularly small discus. They need large tanks and lots of water changes or they become stunted.

They give the native species a hard time in Queensland. The main reason bluies are restricted in Auckland is because they have live young and don't rely on incubation temperatures to hatch eggs.

The problem is they all want babies that are cute, not adults.

I think a lot of the problems today are caused by people wanting instant gratification and they kid themselves by getting a tank to the point where they can dump all the fish they want in to a tank then they will have said gratification. This will probably take as long as adding fish slowly. You can actually add all the fish at once if you do enough water changes and I will bet a dollar to a proverbial that the fish will be better off than swimming in detergent regardless of the concentration. As you said there is more than one way to cycle a tank and each to their own. I have finished my rave and will now let you continue to advise on cycling.

Have you taken in to account that if you make the media loaded to the maximum then when you add a number of fish that produce less waste than those bacteria require for food then they will die and produce an excess of waste products including ammonia and that will not be good for your fish until the correct balance is actually established. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to realise that two danios will produce the amount of waste that two danios will produce. With experience you can tell if fish are stressed or not. If in doubt do a water change.

Fishless cycling is a con job produced by people that want to sell products. If you add a couple of hardy fish such as zebra danios and do regular water changes they will be perfectly OK. No one knows how many flakes of food or dead shrimps produce the same ammonia as the fish you are going to add so the balance is not a balance at all and far more stress is produced when the fish are added. I used to breed 50000 fish a year and have imported fish and I have never done a fishless cycle and never had a problem either. The more fish you add, the more water changes you do. There is an equilibrium between ammonium (harmless) and ammonia (harmful) which is related to pH and is diluted by water changes. I used to add over 1000 baby angels a few days old to an uncycled 50 litre tank and never had a problem. I fail to see how the cleaning agents in cloudy ammonia regardless of dilution can be better for the fish than water changes. Everyone to their own.

Why would you want to put detergent in to your aquarium. It is the detergent and whatever else is in there that makes it cloudy. I cannot see how that is better for the fish than adding a fish or two and cycling the tank naturally like grandad used to do. Everyone to their own I guess. I have kept and bred thousands of fish and have never artificially cycled a tank yet.

Well done

Most of the crypts at redwood wood have been imported by them and Bob Ward would be one of the most informed people in the country on identifying crypts. He has a lot of literature on flowers of crypts as well as info on DNA. Chances are that his identifications would be pretty spot on.

Probably blue/green algae which is actually a bacteria and can also be red or purple. Another possibility is beta carorotene which is a breakdown product of chlorophyll. I would go with the first.

I get a bit as well.

Most of those crypts he would have imported. some of the Echinodorus I gave to him. We used to swap plants when I was growing them. He was always in to crypts and I was growing a lot of Echinodorus sp.