Stella

:lol: brilliant! Mine were Simon. All of them. Then it got to the stage of going spotlighting and seeing 'a fleet of Simon' or 'ooh, I caught a Simon!'. When I discovered that they start off as males and grow up to be female (they saw the light!) the name proved to be even more wonderful: big shrimp were now called Simone 8) :nilly:

Yay, Coddie is back! :happy1: :happy2: (note the new emoticons, we have become much more enthusiastic) I was worried about you - flattened in the earthquake then vanished! Good to hear your love of natives is still strong :) Definitely not a banded - colours are all wrong, mouth is not long enough, right genus though Definitely not koaro - colours better but head shape is wrong (for koaro I would expect a flatter pointier profile, larger eye and more inclined to sit on the ground. So, some kind of South Isnand non-diadromous galaxiid then. I think canterbury galaxias is pretty common, but probably your best bet is to get a list of them and work through the distributions crossing them off. The NIWA fish atlas would be handy for this. Of course there are a bunch of species in that messy little species complex that are not described or teased out. Yeah you missed the grand announcement of my book :happy1: drop me an email if you want one. Insect Direct - yeah, after flooding my entire house (literally) I have now learned to stand by the tank when it is filling...

congratulations on your temperature Weird about your torrie, not something I have come across. Yeah, whitespot is good at hiding. The usual trick is to keep medicating for one week after the last spot falls, or two just to be extra safe. With your odd inanga, is the head shape similar to the others? Particularly look at the overall profile, eye size and mouth length/angle/relationship to eye. There can be a fair bit of variation amongst inanga. I had one that a native fish scientist refused to believe was an inanga! (it was, I win 8) )

Your mantis is the introduced South African one, slowly spreading south and displacing the natives. I didn't know they could change colour, but there definitely is a fair bit of colour variation amongst them, on a continuum from brown to green. The native mantis is quite straight-bodied, with a thorax a similar width to the abdomen (not waisted like your girl), is a solid dark green with bold blue ears on the inside of the forelimbs.

GO SIMON!!!!! :bounce: :happy1: :happy2:

Nitella is a native branched algae, looks like a plant. Cold water, low light etc. Stronger than oxyweed. Maybe someone locally has some, or gives you an excuse to go splashing around in streams

I just get mine under trees.... always some leaf litter piled somewhere in the bush. You definitely want (predominately) dry brown leaves. Some will float for a while, I tend to pull out those still floating after a week. Rewarewa and ponga leaves tend to be a lot more robust and don't break down very fast. They make a great structural element for the softer leaves. Just remember your tank is not a sterile environment, and nor should it be. Your tank will wind up with dirt in it (shock horror!) and gravel vacuuming is impossible. The leaves may wind up doing things you don't expect, and particularly in the early weeks you may get a cloudy bacterial bloom. This won't harm the fish etc, just looks a bit manky and will clear in time. Good water circulation is important during this time to keep oxygen up. Negatives aside, leaf litter in aquaria looks AWESOME and it is great seeing the fish diving into it! :happy2:

backswimmers are pretty effective predators, they were probably the problem. There are two types of freshwater 'limpet' that you might come across. One only gets to ~3mm long and is fairly transparent. That is Ferrissia, possibly a native. Is pretty common in aquaria, moved in on plants. The other gets up to 12mm and has a dark, strong shell. This is Latia neritoides, also native, evolved for fast-flowing water and secretes a glowing mucous when threatened - how cool is that!? Not sure how well they do in aquaria. They certainly don't do well with bullies.

yep, female redfin. The diagonal stripes says it is redfin, the lack of red says that it is female. Zev has been learning! :happy2:

Remember not to use fresh wood in your aquarium. It will leach sap and who knows what else. And poor little native corokia - let it live! They are beautiful plants. :tears:

Oh no! very sorry for your losses Whitespot outbreaks are not unheard of in the wild in summer, particularly in lakes and ponds where the water gets thermally stratified and can't mix so the lower levels become hypoxic and the top levels become too hot, squeezing the fish into a narrow habitable band. Anyway, in your pond probably just the whole pond got a bit too warm, stressing the fish and making them more susceptible. Unless you had quarantined AND treated all your fish before putting them in the pond, chances are some were carrying the parasite, possibly hidden in the gills. How are you going to treat them? At least once treated (assuming no more arrivals carry the parasite) this shouldn't happen again, but it is a useful indicator that things are getting a bit stressful for them. Time to plant a nice fast-growing ngaio or similar to make an umbrella over the pond Congratulations on your baby crays - very cool! Make sure you get some photos

With snails in aquaria, it is more of an aesthetic thing than anything else. People seem to just not like the look of them everywhere (personally I love them, and they convert stuck-on algae to easily-removable pellets). Each to their own. With the waterboatmen.... the small ones could have grown up? The large ones may have flown away. It takes a very long time for them to die of old age. I doubt that the tadpoles ate them - they are very fast and probably crunchier than the tadpoles pathetic jaw muscles could cope with.

:lol: LOL in this case, possibly literally. It looks like a tiny cicada - do they even make them that small??

NAtive fish are available for sale at some pet shops, more likely up your way. But going hunting for them yourself is so much fun, and give you great ideas for biotopes, as you get to see where the fish live and how the streams work. Indeed, aside from the aquarium equipment, everything that goes in your tank can be free from the stream A tank that size would be awesome for natives - the huge volume would really buffer the temperature keeping things more stable, and presumably there is a huge ground area !drool:

native fish :happy2: :happy1: :happy2: :happy1: :happy2:

If the conditions aren't right tadpoles can delay morphing. An iodine deficiency can cause it, but there are probably other factors. I had some this year from a weird spot - the tadpoles were HUGE and very slow to develop. compared to the other taddies I had from another site. They had back legs and were clearly moving their arms inside their skins. When they did eventually morph they were quite large compared to the normal ones.

This article should be considered compulsory reading on whitespot: http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/health/ich.shtml There are a lot of myths about it that can make it much harder for people to properly eradicate it, this article holds nothing back in exploding the myths. Removing apparently non-infected fish from a heavily infected tank *may* reduce the chances of infection, BUT they need to be treated for the parasite. It is invisible when it first latches on, and it can be hiding in the gills. Yes, they can spread between tanks, make sure you don't use the same equipment in infected and non-infected tanks. Your wet hands are considered 'equipment' Your friend should treat to be on the safe side. (This emphasises the importance of quarantining EVERYTHING, even apparently healthy fish from your friends) Certain fish are more susceptible to infection, particularly scaleless fish and bottom dwellers. The critical thing with whitespot is to continue to treat after all the spots have fallen off.

What are the actual dimensions of the tank? When keeping natives, there are two critical measurements: ground area and volume. They are (mostly) not mid-water swimming, so need a large ground area, and a larger volume means a more stable temperature. If you are stuck with a small tank, what about doing a critter tank? There are a few threads here now about doing pond-critter tanks, or you could do a stream critter tank. Kids love bug and these tanks are seriously fascinating. With the stream-critter tank, you can also add in lessons about metamorphosis etc, watching the mayflies hatch, how things breathe underwater, food webs. With the air con, is this also on during the weekend? Afternoons? 18 degrees would be fine. Get a thermometer that logs the maximum and minimum temperatures and leave it for a week. You want the tank for 10 weeks, is this to fit with a specific topic or something? If you have more freedom it could be great to do a critter tank in the summer months, then convert it to fish during winter. One advantage is that it will be somewhat established before the fish arrive. Include the kids in the setting up of the tank - take them to a stream, give them nets, buckets and tell them how to catch things. Waterlogged does have a point though: technically you do need a permit to release fish, including putting native ones back to where they came from. I suggest you talk to your local DOC office.

Absolutely wholeheartedly agree. The native eel populations are crashing in a major way due to commercial fishing. They are a quota species but the quota has only been caught once in one region. They just can't find enough to catch so the catch rate has been plummeting since the 1970s. Exporting our native wildlife to countries that have already driven their eels to the brink of extinction. :an!gry

Instead of doing this one thread at a time, here are all the introduced fish that live in NZ streams that you CANNOT possess, breed, transport, release, sell, breed etc etc etc: brown trout rainbow trout sockeye salmon Chinook salmon Atlantic salmon brook char mackinaw gambusia perch koi carp silver carp orfe rudd tench I may have missed some...

Your swimming beetle may be a mite: http://www.google.co.nz/images?q=aquati ... 80&bih=839 I have one in my bath-pond outside. It is the size of a pin-head and swims around crazily - 'scampering' is a really good description! It turns out that the mites have a parasitic life stage, which are the little red blobs you see attached to the thorax of some boatmen and backswimmers. The adults are usually carnivorous, eating little critters of all types. (I think you would enjoy this book: 'An introduction to the freshwater crustacea of NZ' (1976) by Chapman and Lewis. Often on Trademe for circa $45. Currently being updated for a reprint. A technical book but also quite readable and entertainingly written)

WOOO CITATION! :happy1: hehehehe Yeah, they get big, but not often seen that big. I saw a photo of one sitting on a woman's hand. its nose was by her watchstrap and the tail end hung way off her fingertips Commons and giants can be hard to tell apart, even at that size. Looking forward to seeing your pics!

Yes, that is the native one. NICE photo!

Different species Good spotting! Azolla pinnata is an introduced species, apparently spreading from its invasion site in Warkworth (ie way the hell up north). This one may cause more problems as the branched roots can cause it to mesh and form mats. Azolla filiculoides is the native one and grows in V-shapes. Azolla are tiny free-floating ferns, and very cunning ones: they have a symbiotic cyanobacteria (bluegreen 'algae'). The Azolla creates little pockets for the bacteria to live in and take advantage of the cyano's nitrogen-fixing ability. The genome of the cyano is reducing - it doesn't need to do a whole bunch of stuff now that the Azolla makes a nice home for it. At some point it will probably become completely reliant on the Azolla as a host.

Oh that is great to hear! Always good to get a final update on threads like this. Did you decide in the end if it was whitespot or something else? And which treatment did you stick with?