Stella

yup, I am guessing Nitella too. They are a genus in the family Characeae (all of which are known as charophytes) and these are probably the last common ancestor between algae and plants. Nitella is a ALGAE!! Hence the lack of roots, leaves or flowers. All Nitella in NZ are native. Even cooler: Every segment/branch is a single cell. Grows fast in high nutrient tanks. I am told it does better in low light than high light. Obviously being native they normally grow in cold water. What temperature is your tank? I would be interested to learn how they go in warmer tanks and if others are growing them

Was the fish recently added to the tank? They are more likely to try and escape then.

Absolutely. And the people moaning about the species that we cannot get in NZ should take a close look at all these deliberate and accidental introduced pests and then start noticing all the unique species that we have that the rest of the world can't get.

Coincidentally, I ran into this yesterday: Keeping Weta in Captivity http://www.doc.govt.nz/upload/documents ... isc001.pdf (first .pdf in a series, others linked at bottom of this) I am currently needing to 'fact check' some husbandry manuals on weta for a public project. Not something I know about personally, so would also be interested to hear what others have to say!

ok, I will be helpful According to Wikipedia: black colouration, velvety appearance, 'telescope' eyes, double tail (and/or fantail), short rounded body.

hmmm, passionate love, honour, jealousy, suggestibility and rage..... though perhaps this is not for an english class?

SNOW LEOPARDS?? I think you are on the wrong forum... :lol:

I know nothing about cars or what turbo is exactly, but I have heard it makes insurance more expensive.

yep, yay for legal illogicalities! I have no idea if it is even possible to get a permit, I doubt it. And given the size they get (eventually) it probably wound't be granted to a private person, as opposed to a zoo etc.

illegal. Along with practically everything else you may want to do to a trout that doesn't involve licenses and approved equipment. (We caught a 55cm while electrofishing a fortnight ago! Had to let it go )

(actually that is a pretty impressive costume, well done!)

I suggest you focus in on a theme for the tank. Having things themed really helps making it cohesive and easier to manage. Either pick a habitat type and choose the 'decor' etc and species based on that, or pick a core species or two, and build the rest based on what suits them. Active fish: your best bet are bullies. Really fascinating to watch, always up to something. Several different species. Crayfish are equally fascinating, but you need to be careful that they are smaller than the bullies... Inanga or smelt are a nice schooling fish, but lose that if the tank is small. Good thing with them is they almost never hide, unlike all the others. Kokopu are active when small but tend to become lurkers later. Still an interesting fish though. Torrentfish and koaro are awesome in a fast-flowing tank, but can be a bit like having a tank full of rocks most of the time. The tiny mussels are pretty common in silty farm streams and boggy forest areas. I have only seen them myself in farm water troughs. They are pretty fragile so wouldn't go well in a gravel-bottomed tank. I am fascinated by them but need to find a decent source. Would be great to be able to share them around other keepers! Flatworms.... that sounds interesting! Not sure what you mean but... kewl! Planaria perhaps? Certainly an interesting thing trying to create an aquarium with various other critters adding to the ecosystem. I used to have a self-sustaining population of native snail living in the gravel of one tank. Never saw them just sucked them up when doing water changes. Keeping them cool over summer is a problem, though probably less so for you in the South Island ;P Depending on the size of tank and general situation you might be able to get away with fans aimed at the water surface (evaporative cooling). Beer fridges etc are often talked about in DIY articles, but not sure how effective they really are. Sorry, yes, Dead and Doug are probably somewhat hungry.

Hi there, There are several native freshwater bivalves. The freshwater mussel for starters! Also several much smaller species in the Sphaeridae family, and I think some other bigger ones.... They do make good biofilters BUT: The native freshwater mussels are a threatened species, suffering severe recruitment failure and degradation of adult habitat. Aside from that it is VERY difficult to keep them in aquaria without slowly starving them to death. They filter massive amounts of organic matter from the water and keeping them in a nice clean tank just doesn't have enough. I knew a girl doing her master's thesis on mussels and was growing vat after vat of green water for them and still struggling to keep them ok. However the tiny Sphaerids (also pea mussels, pea clams, fingernail mussels, fingernail clams etc) can reproduce in captivity, and have a life cycle of about a year, so they can potentially create a sustainable colony based on the actual food supply in your tank. In addition to what Spoon said, winter is not great for finding natives as they tend to go to ground a bit and be less active. And good point about the trout rivers, or at least the smaller tributaries of those rivers. What sort of natives do you have and are you after?

sexxxxy!

hehe yup. Or ring a friend from a bus an hour out of town and beg them to go check if the hose was turned off or not.....

and, um, smoking is bad for you...

neat idea! What attributes does wood for a pipe need to have? Presumably it needs to be quite hard. I am wondering about totara. Not that I really know much about native timber...

Hello and welcome! It is legal to keep any native fish, even the most threatened ones. You can even fry them up for breakfast or destroy their habitats (with resource consent)! :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: That said, there are a lot of complicated laws around the movement of them and where you can get them from. Obviously gathering them from DOC land is out. As is putting them back into the wild without a permit. Ethically, for any native fish, it is best to only take them from healthy populations, and to only take juveniles. Taking a few juveniles has less of an impact on the population than taking the breeding stock. Also juveniles adjust to captivity much easier than adults fish. Based on my experience, I won't take a kokopu over 8-10cm or a bully over 6cm. Kokopu currently in the aquarium trade are probably coming from Charles Mitchell's 'whitebait farm' in Raglan, so is not simply raping and pillaging wild stocks for profit without putting anything back. I am not sure where other species are coming from. Most native fish cannot be bred in captivity. What other native fish do you have? Always good to find other native fish keepers

I have an old filter inlet attachment on the end of my hose so I can hook it over the side. Trying to get a normal hose end to stay in the tank while you wander off and turn it on is HOPELESS. The awesome thing is you can use it to do waterchanges - siphoning it straight down the drain. I have a 'doubleadapter' hose connector at the tap so I can fill the hose then flick the switch and let it all drain out. Since the inlet attachment only comes 1/3 of the way down the tank the siphon stops without draining all the water out (also the grill stops fish getting sucked up!). Then flick the switch again, turn on the tap and fill the tank again. (of course brackish water may change things...) (oh and don't do what I did and forget about the hose and go out. I flooded my house and lost half my fish over summer!! Now I am only allowed to use the hose to fill the tanks if I am standing beside the tank The Whole Time. :oops: )

I suspect the native shrimp would be ok at 20 degrees, as long as there is sufficient oxygen, and if you have CO2 that means the plants start pumping out the oxygen, I think... If you let the tank establish then add the shrimp (which seems to be what you are doing anyway) there should be plenty of food for them. They just eat tiny biofilms on surfaces. If you get the balance right the plants should be outcompeting the algae and the shrimp will keep everything else nice and clean Though I am guessing that is your idea.

I know same rule generally works for fast-water species. It attempts to recreate the hydrological conditions. The huge advantage that tropical fishkeepers have with this sort of setup is that the heat from the pumps is a good thing. My two pumps raised the water temp by 7 degrees in WINTER. Not good for cold water fish.

Filters would normally be too low flow to do what you want. I recommend this: Take your total tank volume in litres, multiply it by 30. The result is the number of litres an hour flow you wan MINIMUM. Divide this across several pumps to distribute flow more evenly. Remember if you do the system in the link above, every elbow and length of plastic slows down the water and increases motor wear, due to friction or having to bend the flow. I had a 4ft (220lt) tank set up for a river flow. It had two 3500L/h pumps in it, giving a combined flow of 7000L/h. The fish dealt with it easily, they could have coped with much much more! Mine was for native torrentfish, bluegill bullies and shortjaw kokopu. Was awesome but had a tank disaster last year and it is no longer set up

It only takes one time to learn the hard way. Or for me it was twice. Tank full of whitespot after dropping new fish directly into it is not fun. I quarantine everything for at least three weeks before it goes near my tanks. And that includes being thoroughly anal about avoiding cross contamination of water from quarantine to main tank, even if no diseases are obvious. I learned that one the hard way too! Even if you never get a sick fish or quarantine a new fish in your entire fishkeeping life, a spare tank is incredibly handy for separating stroppy fish, coming to the rescue if a tank breaks, and a multitude of other things. Don't bother with a new one, scratched up cheap second hand ones are fine.

wow, seriously unpleasant! Sorry, no idea what would cause that, but when you get your zebra plecos (and any new fish) make sure you quarantine them for at least 2-3 weeks before they go in their new home. It is a shame this is not standard practice in the hobby, as learning the very hard way like this totally sucks (please don't flush fish, dead or alive. You don't know where you are spreading that disease to. I have seen a goldfish that turned up alive at the sewage treatment plant! Dead fish should be buried or put in the rubbish, and the most humane way to kill a fish is by whacking it into something hard. I put fish in a thin produce bag and whack it several times quickly onto concrete to be absolutely sure it is dead) Sorry, I wish I had something positive to say.... I am not actually wanting to make you feel worse!

http://www.conservationmaven.com/frontp ... xotic.html (blog link) About research by Ian Duggan from Waikato Uni. I saw him present on this at the NZ Freshwater Sciences conference in 2008. He said there that he also sampled some pet shop tanks, which of course had higher numbers or exotic critters, and are of course the gateway. I can't access the scientific paper, but the abstract is thus: The aquarium trade has a long history of transporting and introducing fish, plants and snails into regions where they are not native. However, other than snails, research on species carried “incidentally” rather than deliberately by this industry is lacking. I sampled invertebrates in the plankton, and from water among bottom stones, of 55 aquaria from 43 New Zealand households. I recorded 55 incidental invertebrate taxa, including copepods, ostracods, cladocerans, molluscs, mites, flatworms and nematodes. Six were known established non-indigenous species, and eight others were not previously recorded from New Zealand. Of the latter, two harpacticoid copepod species, Nitokra pietschmanni and Elaphoidella sewelli, are not native to or known from New Zealand, demonstrating the aquarium trade continues to pose an invasion risk for incidental fauna. The remaining six species were littoral/benthic rotifers with subtropical/tropical affinities; these may or may not be native, as research on this group is limited. A variety of behaviours associated with the set-up and keeping of home aquaria were recorded (e.g., fish and plants in any home were sourced from stores, wild caught, or both, and cleaning methods varied), which made prediction of “high risk” behaviours difficult. However, non-indigenous species had a greater probability of being recorded in aquaria containing aquatic plants and in those that were heated. Methods for disposal of aquarium wastes ranged from depositing washings on the lawn or garden (a low risk for invasion) to disposing of water into outdoor ponds or storm-water drains (a higher risk). It is recommended that aquarium owners be encouraged to pour aquarium wastes onto gardens or lawns—already a common method of disposal—as invasion risk will be minimised using this method.