alanmin4304

A number of years ago I imported Goldfish but Maf made it so difficult I got them though the first 6 weeks then couldn't get any sense out of Maf so put the fish down and plonked them on the Maf guy's desk in a frozen lump and told him they were all there and he could count them when they thawed out. Then it was 6 weeks quarantine in a quarantine building then they could be in ponds in a secure building or fenced and protected from other animals, birds and people etc. The offspring could be sold but the imports had to be kept for 4 years before selling. I paid for 7 inspections in 6 weeks and could get no sense out of Maf about how many more inspections I would be paying for over the next 4 years so flagged it. The inspections cost a lot more than the goldfish. As far as I am aware imports of goldfish were banned a while after that because of a disease (forget which one) which was discovered in imported goldfish in Australia and it was felt that it was a risk to trout and salmon in NZ. I understand that is still the case. It is probable that people felt it was easier to breed the imports then destroy them and avoid more quarantine but continue breeding from the offspring. We must protect our trout and salmon so they can control our native fish and prevent them from causing a population explosion.

In summary, as I said, you are probably better off without it in normal and continuous usage. It also has the ability to store chemicals to the point of getting overloaded then dumping them. I have a number of small internal filters which had carbon and sponge and I have replaced the carbon with more sponge. If you want to remove meds or tanin you can do it with water changes or by adding carbon when required.

I think carbon is realy fantastic stuff. It produces a high class food on a barbi but is just a pain in aquarium filters. I would replace it with something more useful (and have done in my filters)

Wait patiently.

With all the waste from fish and food there is a lot of chemistry going on in an aquarium and they tend to go acidic

I wouldn't use all that stuff. Just do water changes. A pH of 6.8 is so close to neutral the fish would not know the difference and the changes in water chemistry will be minute if you do water changes regularly.

The cheapest would be an old bimetalic aquarium thermostat. I use an electronic love one from Homershams which was around $120 I think. It regulates the temperature with a hysteresis of one degree and displays the actual temperature. I have one tank divided into 6 compartments and controlled by one thermostat. The temperature can be regulated by having different depths of water. The tanks are 1200x450x400 and the heater is 300watts and the same size as the tank footprint.

If they are not cyclops they must be a first cousin. They swim faster and differently to daphnia

I am not sure what the white dots are either but I get them when feeding daphnia and they are not as popular to eat as the daphnia.

Thanks for that. Report back and we will all learn something.

Greatv to meet you and I am sure the turtles will lose their emarrassment in time. Very helpfull visit--I learned heaps.

Water changes remove nitrate and phoshate and are a lot cheaper.

It is likely to be a stored product pest and was in there as eggs which were not spotted. The beetle may be a common one found here as well or could be a species not found here at all. In any case Maf should be looking in to it. If you give it back to the supplier it may not be investigated properly but if you give it to Maf and you request that they inform you of the outcome the right paths may be followed and it is likely that the product will be withdrawn and properly disposed of.

ART --yea right.

You don't need a filter or an airstone, it is just a way of increasing the natural loading of fish. The purpose of a quarantine tank is to isolate everything so the less you have in there the less risk of transmitting diseases. A bare tank is easy to steriluize betwwen uses and in my opinion would cause less stress than the disease you are trying to cure. Some people have been known to deliberately stress fish to bring out any latent disease that might be there.

You could use them in your next stir fry.

If white spot looks like the fish has been sprinkled with grains of salt then velvet looks like it has been sprinkled with fine pepper. It can be best identified by looking at the fish in the dark with a torch. If it is that then the other fish will be infected as well.

Algae blooms are usually caused by an imbalance of phosphate/nitrate and often the adding of nitrate can fix the problem so the removal may-----?

I would never use a filter in a hospital tank. Just a bare tank and heater with an airstone if there were a few fish. A lot of treatments would kill the filter anyway or at the best give it a bad headache.

In a previous life, when I was keeping cold water marines, I made a setup where I had 200 litre containers on a trailer, a 12 volt bilge pump on a float and a hose off the bottom. Float out pump, connect leads to car battery, read newspaper and fill drums from below any floating debri in the sea. I used to then store the water in black 20 litre containers for a few weeks to let any solids settle out and reduce the bioload. The theory was that you got a bacterial bloom when the water was removed from any natural predators and storing it in the dark reduced that. True or false--don't know.

I have a RENA which turns the lights on/off. turns the air off for 5 minutes and then feeds the fish before turning the air on again. It is over 30 years old and still in perfect working order. That is the only make I am familiar with.

One of the reasons it is so hard to get hold of is that the dose required to put you out is almost the same as a fatal dose, It has a lot of bad side effects and it is very difficult to measure quantities when you are sniffing a wet rag.

I have bought it from the same places that sell the acrylic. It was in the form of an adhesive where the acrylic had been predisolved in the solvent. That was some time ago and the law on sales may have changed since but it could be a good place to start.

A UV unit produces UV light which acts as a sanitizer and will kill off bacteria and algae in the water column but will not remove the dead matter. An RO unit is a fine membrane that allows water and other similar and smaller sized molecules to pass through but will remove compounds having bigger molecules so it is a type of filter and produces water that is purer than that being treated but not as pure as distilled water. They are not even similar, so do not produce the same sort of water.

If a shark can eat a seal in a number of bites it could become a 20k pound lure.