alanmin4304

With or without the added vitamins?

It takes a couple of minutes to do water changes on a few hundred bottles. That is why most of the people in NZ sell their fighters at the unsexed stage and wonder why thy don't get much for them.

Could always unplug the fireplace.

It would be one of the "stored product pests" and the eggs would have been in there and are still hatching. Probably a type of flour moth (there are a few) and they generally leave a web like can be seen. Usually found in grains and cereals and noticed when the webs become evident. If you are embarrassed by the wee darlins you can send them down here for scientific disposal to my newts before they become moths and go off to infest the rest of the house. Seiving removes all but the eggs. They would be good to culture for newt tucker but I would be caging about having them in the house as they can be a right pain to get rid of.

If you breed and raise fighters properly you can get hundreds of fry, half of which you would expect to be males, so where are you going to put the rest?

I understood that the long finned swords were bred by using a normal male over a long finned female. Is it possible to have winkie envy?

Heaters do have a device to turn them off when they reach a certain temperature. It is called a thermostat

Fish will generally handle significant changes in temperature, hardness and pH if it happens slowly enough. When importing fish it is normal to put the contents of the bag (fish and water) into a shallow container and keep adding small quantities of water friom the tank they are going into over an extended time then netting the fish out and putting them into the tank before disposing of the water. The fish are generally overcrowded to save on freight and the chemistry and temperature are quite different but the fish are OK if it happens slowly enough.

You can make the traps as you suggest or like an upside down tent. You can also add a stainless steel or glass rod above the bottom crack because the females often lie over it and can get damaged. I used to make the trap with enough clearance side, bottom and ends in order to easily siphon off waste and catch babies. The bigger you make the setup the easier it is on the fish and yourself. If you make it like a tent, with some practice you can lift the tent,fish and some water and place it in an adjoining tank while you clean the original or catch fry. A couple of solid straps on the trap will keep it off the bottom of the holding tank. A small length of glass or plastic tubing with a hose connected will help in siphoning gunge off the bottom. It is a bit of a mission but plastic tube can be bent in hot glycerine to make it easier still.

If you got the centre portion divided up as well and mesh on the bottom you could put the whole lot into another tank and heat that. To water change the lot at one time you simply lift it up and drop it again. Doing water changes on individual jars can be a total pain.

Natural light is good but realy needs to be from the top, in which case you will need skylights and best to double glaze to hold the heat. You will need lights as well. I set mine up so it complied as a quarntine room as well so each tank had a light over it. In addition I ran a 12 volt system with a small bulb over each tank and used them as pilot lights. This attracts the brine shrimp and has the fry feeding at night as well (and growing quicker and better). If you are half handy working with glass now would be the time to build some decent sized live bearer traps fot the gravid females to be in. If you have good sized traps you will obtain all the fry and stress the females and fry a lot less because they can be in there a lot longer.

Agreed.

Mg/litre is parts per million as there are one million mg/litre. Hardness is expressed as calcium carbonate even though it may be there as calcium chloride or a magnesium salt

I may stand corrected but I understand that pakeha means stranger or strange person. If you think of the people on the beach gathering shellfish when Capt Cook arrived in a sailing ship in the strange garb of those days it would not be hard to believe. I was also told that maori meant normal person and that they generally regarded themselves as being of a certain tribal ancestry rather than a race.

Don't hit me again boss, I can't help it IZE A MALE.

When I was breeding fighters I used to raise the males in seperate quarters where they can see each other and keep showing off. I think they get better fin development by doing that. I built a large tank that fitted inside another tank and put mesh on the bottom instead of glass. Then divided it into seperate chambers of about 75mm square and sat the whole thing inside the slightly larger tank. Excess food dropped out through the mesh and to do a water change you just lifted the whole inner setup and dropped it again. If you make it with enough clearance at the side and bottom you can siphon the waste away.

They should be fine on stones.

It is a lot easier to see the difference with males and females when you have some of each. Sorry, I don't have any kribs at the moment. I was breeding the albinos and they throw a small percentage of normals, which is unusual for albinos.

My friend told his liberated partner that he was going to go down the manhole and fix the leaking waste pipe which had turned the area under the floor into something not nice. He was reminded thatit should be a person hole and promptly declared that it would be that when someone else climbed into the mud and gunge.

There are a lot of terms which are commonly used but are actually offensive to those involved. Chinaman is derogatory but is commonly used and as my best man used to say, you don't hear people talk about a Japanman. I don't see it as PC, I think it is a chance for us to stop insulting people.

As some one said already, we don't see a lot of Inuit people here so we are not familiar with their cuture or sensitivities. We are however familiar with African American sensitivites and would not think that making a black version of the confectionary and calling it a nigger baby would be apropriate. I think they should admit that they made a mistake and fix it.

I have seen many people over the years get very enthusiastic about getting lots of tanks and breeding heaps of fish, then give it all away after the power bill arrives. I used to have a purpose built fish house 12ftx8ft with between 50 and 60 tanks (depending on what I was doing) and the whole room was heated with a one bar heater that hardly ever came on. The most important thing is to insulate the hell out of the room to keep your running costs down. The next is to have as much water in there as you can because it acts as a heat sink. It is easy to heat the air once you have the water warm. Other than that I would suggest you think carefully about what you want to do and try to design the setup so that all the work is minimised.

Finished it today so next and last step is adding beardies once it all checks out OK.

I bred them many times in caves in a community tank and siphoned the babies out a few days after free swimming. I then raised them on brine shrimp nuplii in bare tanks.

I have used about 1.5 litres @ about $45/litre because it is a double decker 1600x600x600 painted inside and out. You will need way less than that. Turps based enamels are probably going to wear better but I was just taking the lazy way to clean brushes. I tried breeding locusts in a glass aquarium with a customwood lid and a light bulb and had little success which I put down to the formaldehyde. Changed the containers and hey presto.