Stella

yes I watched a hydra ingest most of a rather large mosquito larva. Respect! I found a very small bully in my critter tank last week. I have absolutely no recollection of where that came from.

What a cunning overflow design! definitely interested to see how this goes.

nice memory! These look quite different to the 'chandelier' retracting things, but appeared in the tank at the same time. There seem to be heaps of 'trumpets' but I couldn't find any 'chandeliers' when I wanted to take a sample to uni. They could well be a similar thing, or a different form of the same thing. This is the original thread, with photos: viewtopic.php?f=41&t=50080&hilit=ufo

don't people say increasing sound from a filter is due to a worn impeller, which is easily replaced? (I often sleep with earplugs as sound like rain etc can give me a really bad sleep. Cut foam ones in half and they don't stick out and get annoying)

no idea! I assume they just came with a collection of trough bugs. There are thousands in there but they are invisible most of the time except when it gets low in oxygen and they stick their tails out of the peat and form these amazing waving meadows (good indicator species!) I have no idea how you would separate them from the substrate. I took some odd things into uni last week for my supervisor to identify using a microscope. Turns out they are the ciliate protozoan Stentor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stentor_(protozoa) The cilia (little moving hairs) are all around the edge of the trumpet and beat so fast you can't really see them, just looks like a sort of glowing halo. The 'bodies' also wave around a little and they can swim quite effectively using the cilia. When disturbed they 'flinch' and contract into a ball. Pretty cute for a single celled organism! The green is the nitella they are living on, the little trumpets are the Stentors:

the landscaping place on the main road through Summerhill has some. Probably any landscaping/gardening place would.

Well, that is true about the natural aeration, but it is also a balance. The term is 'biological oxygen demand'. If the bacteria in the system need more oxygen than is available then aerobic bacteria will die and be replaced by anaerobic bacteria and get manky and stinky very quickly, and it is rather hard for it to recover from that.

Have sent you an email with the details

Hi Ally, The lack of aeration hasn't been a problem. Actually aeration would have been a problem for the beetles and backswimmers that breathe at teh surface. It smells fresh and nice actually (I had to go check!). Things go stagnant when the oxygen is used up and decomposition goes anaerobic (I think, someone might correct me on this). The peat is fairly inert and the thick growth of nitella and floating lemna and azolla are providing plenty of oxygen. The amount of decomposition in pretty low, and it is all just providing nutrients for the plants. I haven't waterchanged it in a few months (naughty!) and I really ought to test the water, especially for nitrates, will be interesting to see just how balanced it is!

yes they would be aquatic mites. Very often seen on the thorax of backsimmers. They are parasitic for part of their lifecycle.

cool! I have a big one up at uni at the moment that was BLACK (looked awesome!) then moulted over the weekend and is now the normal brown colour. (my friend saw it first and was very angry that someone had put a big brown cray in the tank who murdered the black one

I have very little knowledge of native aquatic plants but..... GREAT USERNAME!!!

You recognise the ecological importance and value of your stream, yet you are willing to introduce animals that you know will have negative impact on those values, so you can get some free protein. It is an interesting mix. (Though I guess I just had a milkshake and we all know what dairying is doing to our land, water and future.)

LOL cute! I have an old tea strainer that I took possession of as a nine year old wriggler hunter. I spent HOURS very very still next to a rain water trough at home, swooping in every so often to catch three or four wrigglers to keep in a clear peanut butter jar. Yeah, I was doomed to be a critter geek from an early age.

more reasons why one should read XKCD :happy1:

I guess that does sound slightly odd. I do eat fresh meat just not often, and I wouldn't know what to do with red meat. I am used to cutting up the hearts and they don't creep me out now. Heart is just another type of muscle, I wouldn't be keen to eat liver or kidney, which are different tissue altogether. (A flatmate once cooked a pig kidney - the flat smelled of hot concentrated urine for ages! urgh)

someone mentioned yesterday that they cooked up some ox heart and it was the most tender tasty meat, similar to Anyone else tried it? I tend not to eat much fresh meat as it is expensive, also I rarely eat red meat as I was brought up a veggie and it just isn't on my stomach radar, but I am rather tempted to try this.

Indeed, but because the iwi insisted that the H be put in, the media are calling it Fonganui, which is incorrect. Thus they have homogenised the language rather than retain a local dialect. In an oral language, a mispronounciation is surely a greater error than a 'misspelling'. (I started writing Fonganui to ire a friend who used Whanganui to ire me) Anyway, this is way off topic.

hmm, maybe a plan to get a cheap hydrometer and see how much use I get out of it. So would a hygrometer read the low SGs well? Does temperature matter? Thanks

What do you guys use to measure your salinity? no, I haven't yet caved in to the temptation to do native marine I have a number of fish in quarantine at the moment and am aiming for 7ppt salt as a whitespot preventative, so fairly low compared to seawater.

There is the reason: no quarantine on new fish. Whitespot is killed off at 29-30*C or 7ppt (parts per thousand) salt, that equates to 1tsp per litre.

I think Bilbo is giving away a tank that might just be big enough for some of that wood I grew up in 'fonganui'. Gotta love those dark and moody beaches! A sunny beach is missing 3/4 of its character.

They have these big factories with conveyor belts where they stick the fins on body blanks, then they are off to get painted

Ok, is probably pushing it a bit as an import risk, as small fish are usually imported, but adds to the multitude of things that MAF has to cover when dealing with The List and import requests. You don't normally think of fish as frugivores and seed dispersers! Very interesting and relevant research. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/fish-amazon-seeds/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredscience+%28Blog+-+Wired+Science%29

I left the hose running full-bore into an INSIDE tank and hopped on a bus out of town.... I don't recommend it. Those fish all died within the hour. Anyway it is probably either chlorine or lack of oxygen, apparently tap water is often low in oxygen (though someone amy be able to confirm this for me?). May of course depend on if the supply comes from a lake, river or underground.