ryanjury

Hopefully its not another bad hair day Remember anyone is welcome so if you feel like a drive then feel free to tag along just pm Simon or myself for more details..

lol what is what I meant too

That is a sweet tank Good work! I think that variety is the key with diet.. I know alot of overseas forums seem to have heart attacks when they see tanks like this and freak out about how to feed them. It is very easy to believe these things or just try it for yourself obviously being sensible about it and not chucking half a tray of bloodworms in every day.. I have seen a few tropheus in random tanks around the place fed on nothing but frozen food and normal fish flake and they are fine.

It is pretty easy o work out the worst case scenario and therefore the max your tank could cost you.. Say for example you had a 150W heater in your tank worst case the room is really cold and it is only 24/7 it would use 3.6kw/h a day meaning it would cost around 90C a day to heat your tank. That is making the big assumption that your heater is on all day which it most likely wont be but it will be on more than in summer. You could also line the sides and back of your tank with poly, maybe even the top and stick some on the front at night to keep the heat in.. Add on the same for your filters and lighting etc but they aren't really temperature dependent. edit what ira said is also a good idea they are only like $20-25 and really handy for all sorts of things in your house..

Gutted Adodge really sorry to hear about that, thats apistos for you aye Joe really gutted about the Tri's too they were a beautiful pair.. There is a guy in Christchurch breeding them from the same importation batch though so fingers crossed they get out there from him.

At the moment I would take standard bitaeniata they are awesome fish! And to my knowledge they are the only ones you might be very lucky to find floating around..

I have treated bloat before just used metro in the tank, if the fish are still eating then soaking some food in some metro wouldn't hurt and is the easiest way to administer it.

Feel free to link to a helpful and related thread then As suggested in that thread it is a very commonly asked question and one of the mods here put across most of the very useful info, maybe it could be stored as a sticky here too?

It can be the start of bloat.. At the risk of starting up a massive discussion here that goes round and round from all the bloodworm lovers it might be the blooworms

There is lots of discussion on it here http://fishkeepers.co.nz/forums/viewtop ... f=15&t=635

Edit, just read the title.. Generally if you are feeding your fish lots of good food their poo should be coloured.. Clear stringy poo can be a sign of internal parasites, I believe the bugs are eating the goodness out of the food inside the fish so only clear waste is passed but that is just my guess.. But alot of it can be diet related try feeding some cooked raw peas and see what happens.

Hard to say the maximum sized tank you can go for, realistically you will only be flowing around 12-1300LPH with media in the filters etc. Some say you have to turn over 5x the volume per hour so going on that it you would be looking at around 250L. However I have had african tanks with big fish in them running with only 2-3times, or even have 100-150L tanks with adults with just airfilters on them, so I am not a fan of these "rules" as less certainly does work. However you have to remember with less you have less lee way if things go wrong, your tanks are not as clean (my lower filtered tanks are murky and have more crud floating around) so it is always a weigh up. Personally I would buy an FX5 or something like that and buy a 5 x 2 x 2 or maybe 6 x 2 x 2 and run one of your other filters as well.

It might work but I would be wary of the other oscar being aggressive as he may have claimed the tank to himself. A rearrange of the tank may help with that..

Awesome looking good I have never seen mine spawning lol maybe cuz I am never up at 12am?

Awesome Good work, good luck with the discus.. I hope the imported giraffes are nice, not that there is anything wrong with the ones we already have in the country, but it is always good to get new blood..

I agree there doesn't seem to be much difference between them, but I don't believe it is that easy to just conjure up a new species to make them rarer or worth more? Like Phoenix has suggested I would imagine there is alot of scientific type stuff that has to go into it before a new species is defined and accepted. It is difficult when most of the rift lake fish evolved from the same fish they were just separated in different conditions so evolved differently. I was watching an awesome program on the congo river last night and a similar thing has happened there, due to the depth of the river and the fast flow with predators swimming up and down it species have been separated into different populations. These populations have been evolving differently, they were doing all sorts of genetic testing to see if they were related and stuff like that.

I think my lowest tanks are around 300 above the ground and that is just enough to establish a slow siphon when doing a water change, I have had tanks on the floor before and they are impossible to get siphon going..

I have a few end on banks of tanks in my fishroom.. Means you can fit quite a few tanks in a smaller space, it is a little harder to work on them, and means it is also harder to view the fish in them so definitely not for display tanks..

Our ihug email seems to be ok, I have got the impression that although you are now vodafone customers ex ihug customers seem to be treated differently.. Our only issue with the ihug email was the web based browser was so slow, but we realized it was our fault as we had been using outlook and not deleting any emails off there so there was like 4000 emails it had to load every time we used it..

The kigoma and burundi are actually classified as 2 different species rather than variants of the same species so technically if they were crossed they would be hybrids.. End of the day it doesn't really matter as they are still awesome fish and it is not like we will see (nor will anyone want to pay for) higher quality ones in NZ. http://www.cichlid-forum.com/profiles/c ... .php?cat=9

Fenbendazole is panacure, praziquental is droncit, either seem to work for internal parasites but from my readings the prazi is alot nicer..

lol fair enough considering I sold a few of them to you..

That looks really good man Are you sure there are any fish in there?

Cleaning my FX5 is a pain in the bum, it takes a good hour after I drain it, manage to get it out from under the tank pull it out and then rinse all the media several times in buckets of water from the tank.. I choose not to have mine polishing the water so don't have super fine media or polishing pads in it which clog up and reduce flow and make it need cleaning more often. The standard media in an FX5 is quite coarse so doesn't remove all the tiny particles in a tank. If I did want to polish the water in my tank I would use something like adodge was suggesting, well actually I would make my own like Phoenix said because I am a cheap ass

Unfortunately these threads do end up that way, but this is the thread for the person in question to actually put up his evidence and proove his methodology that brought him to his ID.. Imagine if you were the poor 15yr old who saved all your savings for months to buy some of these "rare" fish only to find out someone had done a dodgy with the ID or they were hybrids or actually maleri reds/golds (which they were purchased as)? Imagine this scenario, a TV store (who has apparently been selling TVs for the last 45yrs) gets an unlabeled 21" CRT TV in and decides it is a 42" plasma, we all know it isn't but to someone who doesn't know anything about TVs they may pay $1000 for this only to find out later it is only worth $100.. Obviously the person in question should front up and stand up for his product and show the comments and IDs given from the fish collectors, they may well be chirwa island I don't know they certainly don't match any reliable internet photo of them but I haven't seen the fish or pure Chirwa islands. Odds are they aren't.. They were purchased as maleris, Chirwa Is peacocks are known to be quite rare in the hobby even in countries that get direct lake imports. But stranger things have ended up here