Stella

Cool, thanks for sharing! Interesting about The general lasting seven years. So little is known about these fish, and they are thought to be quite short lived. Possibly he lived longer due to being in an aquarium (I had a 3 year old inanga, and a have seen a five year old one - they can't spawn in the aquarium so they live longer). What was he fighting with? The image of an inanga beating up a big flounder is great! :lol: Any chance you could try and catch the white flounder and get a photo? Sounds extremely rare, especially for a fish that both hunts and avoids predators by blending in with its surroundings! It has done very well to survive :f77:

Apparently the ones that were put in Taylors Dam near Blenheim were even fin-clipped so they could track growth and/or reproduction Some of these hooligans are very organised. I shared this link on my native fish facebook page and had a couple of nutters trying to tell me that there is no evidence that koi and rudd cause any problems at all :facepalm: In the end I decided to link to only one paper rather than send them the deluge that they deserved.

:an!gry So glad I didn't hold back in my fieldguide manuscript about these environmental vandals. :evil:

Yep, all banded kokopu. The markings being more obvious at the rear of the body is key here. They are really great in an aquarium, but do grow quite big and get rather feisty at the 2-3 year mark. Lovely photos! Feels good getting back to childhood hobbies.

I just came across this, from McDowall's New Zealand Freshwater Fishes: An Historical and Ecological Biogeography (2010)

Now that is elegant in its simplicity! Lovely. (aotealotl, I love your avatar photo!!)

Ben you should have asked a week ago! I have just finished a quick circuit of Southland (and I must say it is lovely! And oddly the coast is like Northland) I saw inanga and bandeds under bridges near the Waituna wetland, southern flathead galaxias near The Key, and gollum galaxias and upland bullies in some ponds near Mandeville. Quite random places though. According to the freshwater fish database, you should be able to find these species not too far from Invercargill: inanga, banded and giant kokopu, common, giant, redfin, upland and bluegill bully gollum galaxias, torrentfish, flounder, common smelt, both eels Go forth and conquer! As for places... no idea, start looking ;P Small streams with forest cover and a variety of flow and substrate types are good places to start. During the day take a hand net, place it in the water below rocks and lift them, sweeping any fish underneath into the net. Repeat until bored or you catch something. (It does work, but can take a while, depending on the density of the fish. At The Key I caught a sum total of three fish) If the surface is not too broken go at night with a strong torch (and a friend for safety). When you see a fish sitting on the substrate, quietly slip one net in front of it, then use a stick or another net to shoo the fish in. If there are no fishy locals here, try DOC or the regional council for good streams to try, I am pretty sure they have some good fishy people I just can't remember any names. Though after your first few expeditions you quickly learn what to look for in a stream, and it becomes easier to explore elsewhere.

I was going to say that the email button is right next to the private message button but I thought that was stating the obvious :lol:

Ads?? What are these 'ads' you speak of? :roll: http://adblockplus.org/en/

Ok, I will be allowing SNEAK PREVIEWS of the manuscript for my second book 'A Photographic Guide To Freshwater Fishes of New Zealand', which will be for this series: http://www.newhollandpublishers.co.nz/l ... sub_cat=14 To qualify for this once in a lifetime exclusive opportunity, all you have to do is read over it with a fine-toothed comb and get back to me with comments by next weekend. Light holiday reading! :thup: (you know what, I am actually begging here. I am supposed to have the manuscript in really soon and it needs a lot of preening and I have hit that place where I feel like I have no idea what I am doing any more and starting to freak out a bit) :nilly: I am ESPECIALLY in need of: 1. people who know their salmoniids and coarse fishes - anglers etc 2. people who are good with written English 3. people who know about mahinga kai and Maori knowledge of freshwater fishes 4. anyone who has seen the wild guppies Native fish nuts are handy too You don't have to read the whole thing, little bits of help are useful too. Please EMAIL ME, I hate the clunky PM system. :mbh: Thanks

Apparently there was a HUGE battle when they were trying to change the law to allow salmon farming. It was an ELECTION ISSUE would you believe?! The massive legal protections for trout and salmon largely stem from the settlers' reactions to the English angling scene, where it was mostly limited to the upper classes who either owned trout streams, or could buy access to them. Hence not being allowed to farm, own or sell them, and access may not be charged for, nor private stocks owned. Today I had my first conversation with another human being in 10 days. It was with a trout fisherman who said that native fish were only trout food and it doesn't matter what happens to them as they aren't part of the economy. I was torn between walking out and leaving my pile of dishes in the camp sink, and sucking it down just so I could have a conversation. :facepalm:

Not sure if they can climb, but I wouldn't trust them not to jump. A lower water level would help. They will live shorter in a tropical tank than in cold water. And yeah, as Fi5hguy says, don't take berried females home, they die fairly quickly.

Nice photos! Looks like the underwater camera survived its incident I think the troutlets are brown trout - the adipose fin has an orange edge to it. (nice rock-stack in the panoramic shot)

Just to complicate matters further, there are landlocked (non-diadromous) populations of all five whitebait species, though some are more common than others. AND there are also non-diadromous *individuals* in waterways that have open access to the sea. So they could have, but they didn't. I also learned recently that the non-diadromous South Island species don't have whitebait-like juveniles. That is a morphology specifically for surviving at sea. Their juveniles look like the adult fish, once they metamorphose from being fry. HOWEVER the dune lakes galaias and dwarf inanga (both descended from landlocked inanga populations) do still have a wee whitebait stage (30mm long - so cute!) but this may have been maintained as the lake is a surrogate for the sea. Or they haven't been around long enough to lose it. Or something.

:lol: good point! Best public native aquarium in the country, though I am rather biased

The rule does apply to those fish. It is a very large blanket! Mostly the rule was put in place to protect trout (as always!). TECHNICALLY the risk from your fish would be almost nothing, but I can't ADVISE that you release them (There is also bit of a lesson in this thread of learning about the needs of an animal before taking it home, be it from the wild or from a pet shop)

Huka Falls are AMAZING (and free)

Ah thanks, I used to have one of a similar size. That should be fine for bullies with the cray, as long as the cray is smaller than the bullies and there are plenty of hiding places. I can't remember if you have had bullies before, but they are really entertaining and active. Shrimp and mountain minnows should be fine, as long as you accept them as food with a medium shelf life I have wondered about how a cray would go in a deep tank that had several levels - would it happily wander up a ramp to a second floor to find food?

I am currently in Dunedin and having a fantastic time hanging out with fish geeks and meeting new species. I met five species in four days! I went fishing with the DOC guys near Wanaka, in the Cardrona Valley (where the pub in the Speights ad is), then came back on my own with a borrowed electrofishing machine :happy1: The most exciting one this week was....AN ADULT LAMPREY! This was from a couple of weeks ago, a lowland longjaw galaxias. Really cute little guy, can't see how they got that name On the threatened list as 'nationally critical' due to their tiny didymo-filled distribution (which is near Oamaru). Taieri flathead galaxias, all of the fish in this stream were beautifully marked. Eldon's galaxias, a roundhead from way up in the tussock plateau near Dunedin. Otago roundhead galaxias (both photos below). You might have noticed the flathead/roundhead groups. While these are generally accurate within each species, not every flathead has a flat head, and vice versa. When one of these galaxias fish grows up in fast flowing water it will develop a flattened head, but if it grows up in very slow-flowing water it will develop a rounded head. Each morphology is better at stabilising the fish in that environment. Brook char (introduced), basically a really really pretty brown trout. Ecologically very similar, but the char is outcompeted by the trout, and mostly restricted to tiny headwater streams, or other habitats that are marginal for trout. So far I have seen (in the wild) 32 out of the 41 native species. Nine to go! My fieldguide is coming along well, but it is going to be bit of a slog to get it finished by the end of the year.

What are the dimensions of the tank?

hehe I think they suddenly feel invincible after they have moulted and hardened - they are aggressive little sods afterwards!

The little fish are bullies of some description. There are a heap of threads about what they need, trawl the archives. As blueether says, it can be difficult getting them onto commercial foods, but oxheart is really nutritious and easy. The elver will probably be harder to feed as they have such small mouths. They are also excellent escape artists, so make sure the tank lid is very close-fitting, and tape up any gaps. He will probably vanish into the gravel most of the time, so don't freak if you can't find him. Native fish often carry whitespot when they are taken out of the wild, so dose the tank with 1tsp of salt per litre, and maintain that (replacing what you removed during water changes) for the next three weeks. Definitely take the heater out, but keep the thermometer and also do some archive searches for keeping the temperature down over summer

mm, I have seen those bumps before in my fish, but not sure what it is. Usually appears when the fish have had low-level stress for a long time,usually summer heat. I think salt worked on it (I would recommend cranking it up to 6ppt and maintaining that for at least a few weeks), and improved water maintenance. It does take a long time for those bumps to go away completely. The deaths seem odd. Maybe there is something else happening that caused that and lead to the bumps secondarily.

...and remember kids: always 'clean, check, dry' between waterways. http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/pests/didymo

Bright reds and yellows.... I don't think I have ever seen a common bully that has anything that could pass for red markings. Cran's bullies can get good reddish markings. I used to feel confident on Cran's/common bully identification, but it seems the variety in Cran's is HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE. I saw a tank of them where they ranged from classic Cran's to what totally looked like a standard common. One trick for telling them apart is to look *very* closely at the top of the head. Bullies have sensory cells set in pores and/or canals around their heads. Typically non-diadromous bullies *do not* have open pores, while diadromous ones do. The confusing part is that non-diadromous populations of common bullies (normally diadromous) lose the pores over time, so some have random numbers of pores. The above picture shows pores and canals on the head of common bullies, ranging from standard-diadromous on the left, to non-diadromous-population-for-a-very-long-time on the right. But also the right image is much the same for Cran's bullies. So, the rule would be, for telling Cran's/commons apart, after checking head shape/pattern: 1. If there are any open pores, it is a common 2. If there are definitely no open pores, it is a Cran's or a common 3. If there are no open pores and it is in a lake, it is most like a common (Cran's don't live in lakes) (I am currently dealing with trying to learn the non-diadromous vulgaris galaxiid complex. I only they were that "easy"! :nilly: )