ryanjury

Yeah it is unfortunate that he has to do stuff like this. As Alan said they are rare but he doesn't know what they are so how does he even know how rare they are? Could be very rare in that they are 1 off hybrids He has stated he brought them as a maleri which they don't look like to me either but who knows what they are.. They are probably the type of thing you would just sell cheap or give males away for display tanks as an unknown peacock..

If you did a full measure of all of your water parameters first then you would be able to figure out what you are working with, your water might just be fine to begin with.. Are you a member of a fish club or anything down those ways where you can take water along and get it tested? Maybe a petshop could also help. uS is micro Siemens which is a unit for conductance (ie a measure of the ability of something to allow the flow of electrical current). For this reason it can be used to measure how pure water is as impurities in it increase its conductance, it is a rough measure for softness of water.. There are plenty of other ways of expressing hardness as well. I suggest you have a read up on water chemistry here http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/c ... y_list.php it is all fairly useful stuff to know about because after all our water keeps our fish

I think they look awesome.. However with their size and the time it takes until maturity and full colour it is probably a bit of a gamble to see what sort of quality fish have been imported Either way it is very cool and I wouldn't mind some. Boban_nz do you work for brooklands? You always seem to have all the new fish and posting photos of them as soon as they appear on the lists?

Wow Where on earth did they come from.. Do you have males/females and will fry be for sale in the future if breeding is successful?

Have you tested the hardness of your water? PH doesn't really matter, well it does but it is alot easier to remedy than hardness. Peat will drop the PH a bit provided your KH is low enough for it to do so. Other things like oak leaves or even the alder cones may help too. The article suggests water of a conductivity of 20uS I know my rain water was around 100uS which is still pretty soft but 5 times harder than suggested. I am unsure if it will have any affect and if they NEED water that soft or not, I guess you will find out if you try it..

From the limited research that I did you would need to have extremely soft water to breed the Cardinals so it has to be rain or even RO water to get it as soft as required.. How soft is the water you are planning to use? Another common issue I found when I looked around at how to do it was sourcing young enough fish, apparently the ovaries harden and the females become unable to lay eggs if they aren't spawned from young, and if they are grown in the wrong conditions they never spawn. Regarding the breeding for money thing, I only keep and breed species I like that way you actually put the effort into them. I would love to say I cover my costs but I am not sure if I took into account everything that I would, but I do know that I can pay the increase in the power bill and for fishfood and sometimes even cover some new ones so that is awesome After all it is just a hobby but it is always good to cover costs along the way and breed and sell some nice fish meet some nice people..

You could try cardinals or rummy nose tetras but they are quite hard to do.. Maybe some danios or nice barbs or something like that? I do hope there are some people out there feverishly trying to breed the shellies, they have already paid crazy prices for fry so hopefully they can breed them and get them out there.. I managed to get 2 and they are such awesome fish, I am still hoping I have ended up with a pair but even if I didn't I am happy to enjoy them until people can breed them and I can get more From my experience of getting 3 and putting them in a 100L tank and having one killed would lead me to believe that your tank is not big enough unless you could guarantee a pair.

Awesome I look forward to seeing photos as the school develops..

I guess it also depends on the person shipping them? Some people are happy to ship but terrible at it, a friend of mine here got some discus shipped the fish were not the size described terribly bagged no heatpad etc etc etc but shipped at his risk so he had no luck getting any replacements on the 2 dead ones..

Really sorry to hear about your loss, it was very fast Yeah I would quarantine try and find another male (if you aren't too disheartened by the loss now). Failing that I would definitely try and pass her on for someone else to try with.

IMO It is almost impossible to determine what the right medicine is to treat with unless you actually figure out what is wrong with the fish. If bacterial then you have to do a culture and figure out what bacteria and then what antibiotic to treat with.. I think that treating antibiotics with a low dose on the rest of the tank would be a bad idea if the other fish is affected with a mild case you run the risk of the bacteria becoming immune to the drugs making them ineffective in the future.

Yeah I would pick some sort of internal bacterial type thing hopefully Jen posts soon and gives you advice on the correct drug to use, furan2 would be a good first guess if it was all you had and it was a Sunday if you see no improvement then it is obviously the wrong thing or not bacterial at all.. Good luck I feel your pain having watched some of the apistos that I had that were just as rare die of similar things

Yeah meth blue is sweet for apistos.

Oh no! I have no real idea what could be wrong, is the fish gasping or showing any other symptoms? I have loosely put most of my apisto deaths down to Columnaris disease http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/c ... isease.php I believe my cases were caused by using water that was too pure and also a lack of vitamins in the food. Again that is just a guess..

I think it might be an opaline gourami but again very hard to tell from pic..

Oh sorry I forgot to put an "and" in there

Nice zebra plec..

Could be that they aren't used to the food it could also be hex so keep an eye on them they might need treatment..

No I love Calvus and would love to get some one day However you will find they aren't listed under shell dwellers.. http://www.cichlid-forum.com/profiles/c ... php?cat=14 They are listed under the Lamprologines http://www.cichlid-forum.com/profiles/c ... php?cat=12 A little bit of here nor there though as they are awesome fish and do like to spawn in shells..

I do find this whole thing hard to understand what has happened your tank is not heavily stocked and you don't appear to have done anything wrong Do you have any spare filters you can run as a back up and maybe steal some cycled media from your other tanks to get 2 filters running?

You would also have to add fish that were actually available from the overseas exporters that our importers import from.

I would give the shanda stuff a go Maybe even ask the seller if you can buy a smaller amount to sample it and see if you like it before buying a larger amount. I have found that food for discus is very much a marketing type thing, for example the NLS discus formula has the same ingredients as the cichlid formula but is more expensive and people buy it for their discus cuz it has a picture of one of the front Unfortunately we don't have NLS easily available in NZ

I don't know about that particular model but they are usually all sealed, can you see any openings or anything? I would just dry it out and then use it

I completely clean out my FX5 on my heavily overstocked african tank that gets a heap of food and also do 50% water changes and I have never had a tank crash. So I have no real idea what caused your crash, but it still sucks I hope you get it under control and don't have anymore losses

Yeah some pics would be awesome unfortunately I got excited when I thought you were in NZ.. The only true shellies that I am aware of in NZ are the ocellatus that were imported recently, calvus are not really considered to be a true shell dweller..