ryanjury

You can use it but have to use a trace element or mix it with other water to get your required mineral content.

I always label the boxes.. I have had a few lots (when I sent with nzpost) stuck in the fridge overnight as they thought they were vaccines and that was why they were in poly boxes.. I am yet to have a problem with NZ couriers and sending fish so figure it is always better to label them "live tropical fish please keep warm and deliver asap" as it will hopefully mean they don't end up in the fridge/freezer NZ post asked that I stop labeling them if I was to continue using them as other depots were complaining. Ended up stopping using them after they stuck 3 boxes in a row on the wrong truck and they ended up in the wrong place or on 2-3 day service and when I called they couldn't track them or tell me what had happened.

My wife rung my local NZ courier branch and the lady checked the email they were all sent, confirmed there was an issue with the SPCA and they have been instructed not to carry turtles only live fish were still ok, so noone needs to worry Apparently all courier companies have been instructed by SPCA not to carry turtles?

Nice looking tank Is the pleco likely to dig up all your plants?

Hard to tell the photo is pretty bad, but I picked a white blaze with yellow coming through from lighting.. More pics would certainly help.

Not a good idea to have 2 holding fish in the same small tank together they are territorial.. The fighting may end up with one of them being injured or spitting their eggs/babies. Obviously you can get away with it if you have a bigger tank or tons of rocks etc.

The photos aren't showing because they are too big this forum is setup to not display big images.. Most other forums have auto resizers or stuff like that but this one doesn't.. Do you have an option for a "clickable URL" on your image host page?

You did everything right.. Just resize your photo before you post it. Easiest way to do it is to download a free image resizing tool (just google it for your operating system) and download it, most just add to the menu that comes down when you right click on photos so you can click resize from there

lol I always thought the second job was rich parents bank rolling

Your photos are too big to post here they have to be small or post clickable photos to allow them to be viewed.. They are pretty fuzzy photos and one of them is face on but at a guess. 1. Male fryeri 2. male blue zebra 3. female kadango With better photos may be able to tell more..

Dunno google is your friend.. I was researching it for my apistos as I have never seen it in my africans so wasn't keen to go squeezing a 2cm long fish. Let us know how you get on!

If she is egg bound she should absorb the eggs and then go back to normal but I wouldn't expect it to happen more than once if there wasn't something genetically or physically wrong with the fish.. Some say epsoms salts and feeding lots of veges can help ease it but I don't know if that would work.. Worst case the eggs don't get absorbed or passed, they go septic inside the fish and massive bacterial infections set in which kill the fish (if untreated). Some also suggest a gentle squeeze to help get the eggs out, again I am not so keen..

Hmm that is weird, does she get skinny straight away or hold the eggs, maybe she is egg bound, but that usually looks fairly obvious as they get huge.. You must have alot of time on your hands to watch all the hours of spawning that fish do to ensure no hybrids.. In saying that it would be fairly obvious if giraffes and empresses were to cross they both have very distinctive fry so you should be ok in that regard. Have any of the other girls bred? I would have kept the 2nd male it is always handy to have 2 if they get along and 2 males in the same colony makes them breed better as they have to compete against another male. I would try them in their own 5fter or something like that to give them some room and peace and quiet to sort themselves out, maybe the empresses are putting them off I have found empresses are really good at stealing eggs and hang around any spawning to try and nip in and eat a few, even if they don't get any they stress the breeding fish out.

The major problem I have with the inconsistency is the fish have to go through a few depots and drop offs to get to their destination what happens if someone along the way decides that they are not allowed to take fish and stops them somewhere random?

When you say no eggs are you actually watching the entire spawning to see if she is laying any? Or are you noticing a day later she isn't holding anymore (ie she spat early?). Sometimes males are infertile but the fish usually hold for a few days before spitting/eating the eggs if they are. I have noticed in my big tank where I put all my breeders when I am not breeding from them that this happens all the time, fish get fat, egg tubes drop down but the fish don't end up holding. This is no issue for me because if they are in this mixed tank I am not breeding from them as they could be hybrids, are you attempting to breed yours in a mixed tank? I don't know the sellers and don't know if this has happened here but I have found that sometimes sellers turn 1 possibly male and female into the best breeding group you have ever seen to sell them, but if you haven't seen them selling fry it is hard to believe. I think I remember (correctly me if I am wrong) something about this group being dodgy when you got them something about 1m and a few breeding females turning into multiple males and 1f?

Gutted NZ couriers is an awesome company What on earth would they have done to cause an SPCA issue? Do the SPCA realise that fish get shipped from all over the world and all over NZ all the time.. Unless a driver was drop kicking live fish around and even then its the drivers fault not the companies..

I am sure if you joined the killie club or talked to someone who keeps them you could find some reasonably priced ones. I have seen them go on here really cheap recently.

I use guppies as dither fish in all of my dwarf breeding tanks with no problems. Sometimes one of the males get a little bite taken out of his tail but generally they are in perfect condition and fast enough to get out of the way. But if you weren't sold on guppies then maybe some killies, swordtails, platties, rainbow fish or danios?

From that thread that I linked about Caryls tank people were getting reasonable priced 12mm tanks made if it was for my business and there were going to be alot of people cruising around it for my own piece of mind and everyones safety I would go with 12mm. Imagine what would happen if your tank did burst and people got killed or injured how you would feel saving $4-500 to start with? Not to mention the fact you business would be ruined.. In saying that I have no doubt a 10mm tank would be fine but a 12mm would be over engineering it enough to say it is less likely to cause trouble. How thick are the display tanks in most fish shops?

General rule of thumb if you use the calculations is don't go over 600mm high in 10mm glass.. Do some research, I know I have a tank that is 720mm high in 10mm glass that flexed so much at the bottom (with full bracing even running along every join even bottom to top in all 4 corners) that it blew the seal at the bottom, luckily it didn't shatter and cause damage. It is sitting still broken up against my fence and I am scared to fix it and set it up again as I have my kids and other people in the fishroom all the time I also don't fancy being cut in half by it. I know that I wouldn't have a tank that tall in 10mm in my house with kids and stuff it is just too risky but it is upto you it may last for years and years or something may go wrong. The lower the safety factor the riskier it is especially if there is an imperfection in the glass maybe a flex in the stand and a kid or something else bumps it or an earthquake etc. Plenty of info here search.php?keywords=glass+thickness+calculator&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search And the calculator here http://www.fnzas.org.nz/index.php?PG=glass2 I think the min you should try and have is a safety factor of 3, you have just over half of that. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=41468&hilit=glass+thickness+calculator Did you do any research before you build your tank or did you just get a heap of glass and chuck it all together?

Would be fairly dodgy making anything that big (especially so over 600mm high) in 10mm glass for a public place.. Talk to a professional tank maker or enlist the help of someone like Barrie for advice first because in a public place you are liable and if anything goes wrong people can die.. Someone had a big tank fail recently think it was Jim R and it threw chucks of 10mm glass across his fishroom and right through other tanks if someone was in there when it happened it wouldn't have been pretty.

What type of fish are they? Sometimes you just have to remove the female if breeding is causing that much trouble. Another option would be to do things that make the fish unhappy (decrease temp, put it in really weird water parameters) so they don't breed but then they wont be happy and you wont enjoy them they may get sick etc and it may not stop them either I guess you could also divide the female off from the males but they will probably still try and breed through the divider causing just as many fights on the male side.

Yeah I thought parrots were part red devil anyway so wouldn't expect the resulting fry to be anything out of the ordinary probably just as Phoenix has said parrots tending towards a red devil, you may even get some which resemble red devils it will be interesting to see. Are the eggs darkening up yet?

This is the auction I was talking about http://www.trademe.co.nz/a.aspx?id=269036228 I think you can id the pacus from that I believe they are red belly pacus, but wouldn't discount us getting all sorts at random times here..

Nice pics and good luck with the fish I know when our kids were younger I sometimes ended up on the internet at random hours because I had got upto them and couldn't get back to sleep or they had decided it wasn't sleep time..