alanmin4304

Since a couple of people with a love of large fish and large tanks with large filters seem to be having some problems understanding what I wrote in plain english while singing around the campfire. Your filter--which you put up for comment is based on the same principles as many commercial and industrial filters. It is a self cleansing backwash filter that is all, and it filters down to 40 microns. I commented that this will clarify the water but will not remove disease organisms. If that is what you want and you can afford it then it will be ideal for you both and I hope you get one each for xmas.The purpose of my comments about treatment of rural water supplies was not to get you both joining in the choruses around the campfire but to point out that prefilters are often requred to avoid too frequent a need to clean the finer filters. Your xmas present overcomes that by automatically backwashing the filter to clear it. However it will not filter diseases and I wish those filters were still available. I think my comments were relevent and were in no way intended to denegrate either of you or large fish tanks with large filters and I hope you continue to contribute usefully to this forum as you have been doing.

I guess you can use an old woolen sock if you wish. I am simply pointing out the 1 micron will filter most diseases and 40 micron will not. The filters I refered to earlier are reverse flow diatamaceious earth filters which were very common years ago but I have not seen of late. I think they are still used in the USA. They were very good filters, especially when a bit of gunge had built up on the media.

Alan gets the idea from dealing with rural water supplies for over 30 years where the treatment regime for a potable water supply was: 1 presettling in a large tank to remove course sediment. 2 filtering with 250-200 micron to remove the next lot. 3 filtering with 50 micron to remove the next lot. 4 polishing with 1 micron to remove disease organisms such as bacteria, giardia etc. 1 micron filters will remove parasites and most bacteria but 40 micron will just make the water look good. You have a good day now.

40 microns is reasonably course filtration. Years ago I used diatomaceous earth filters that were 1 micron and would filter diseases.

There is a guy down here who breeds hundreds of them. pauljones on trademe

No! Orange to orange and gold to gold and never the twain shall meet.

There are three strains of australe in NZ I think. The chocolate is the wild one and the gold is an aquarium strain that came from Singapore. The orange is is another gold strain with more colours. Only breed them to females with the same genetics. There were chocolates about that had been back bred to golds because there were no chocolates of the other sex available at the time. I haven't seen the lighter gold ones for a while.

I have tried garden soil and it was a disaster.

Welcome back

Please add your location to your profile as it will help people to help you. They are available in NZ from time to time and have been advertised on here and on trademe. The usual ones are greek spur thighs, Hermans and occasionally American boxies. You may get a shock at the differences in prices between here and the UK as they cannot be imported and there are not a lot around (hopefully they will become more common in time).

The water company will not add chloramine as it is required to add chlorine which will then react with various things in the water and produce chloramines amongst other things. Sodium thiosulphate will get rid of chlorine and chloramines. It is the main ingredient in water tratments from your pet shop.

Fin rot is a bacterial infection and usually follows damage from other fish. It needs to be treated with an antibiotic and can also be followed by an oportunistic fungal infection. If a fish is unwell it will often be picked on by other fish.

Tell the operator that you wish to speak to the person concerned about the legal status of blue tougue skinks in the greater Auckland area.

It looks like your australi have laid eggs. You can remove them to a small container with your fingers and float it till they hatch. I used a plastic drinking cup. Feed brine shrimp nuplii when they are free swimming.

The question was about blue toungue skinks rather than cats and dogs.

CO2 is added to tanks via a diffuser which gives off millions of tiny bubbles to help with disolving it or by other methods of doing the same thing. The air bubbles from an airstone are much larger so there is less total surface area to react with the water. There will of course be some oxygen go into solution from an airstone but I suspect most is from the atmosphere at the surface as the surface area is increased considerably. The airstone will also be flushing spent gasses from the top of the tank so the atmoshere will remain fresher. Conclusion: Both ways must be ideal. When you first go into a heavily stocked breeding room or quarantine room it is obvious from the smell that there is a lot of waste gasses produced by the fish. Most people I know in this situation will leave the door open for a while to give a complete air change. It does not take a lot of heat to rewarm the air, particularly if you have a large heatsink in the form of many litres of water.

Nothing cool about the damage they do to ecosystems like ours that have developed without them. When the Americans talk about the sound of the catfish rising it is probably because they are the only fish left in the waterway.

Don't know--have never used it and probablly never will. I prefer to use more specific cures that I know will work such as antibiotics for bacteria, fungicides for fungus and parasitides for parasites. Using things that may or may not work will increase the resistance of the disease.

They generally follow a scent trail so you can track them back to where they are coming from. They don't only eat sugar, They cleaned up all the dead fish on the floor of a well known breeder here after the shakes.

It is a requirement of the Auckland Regional Council not the Local Council.

I feed crickets but I wouldn't leave them in there like I would locusts. Just my paranoia I guess.

Welcome to the site. Please add your location to your profile.

She will not brumate properly if the temperature is too hot. Try suitably sized locusts---they are safe to leave in the enclosure. They are movement stimulated feeders and mealies don't move much.

The problem with testing for viruses is the same as bacteria, It only shows that they were not in that sample at that time. Hence the exclusion from working in a food premise for salmonella until you have three clear samples in a row at at least 48 hour intervals. Also most importers have not brought in dwarfs for some time and probably less will now under the new requirements.

It is possible to test for a virus, that is why susceptable fish have to be cleared of it when imported.