Stella

Yeah, these guys are amazing up close! Kiwi are pretty dull and inconspicious... Tuatara barely move and blend in perfectly. Unfortunately most public displays (of which there are very few) do not show them in natural-looking habitat or use terrible lighting so the fish DO look dull and boring. When done well they are amazing to watch. Bring on mid-January when we open The Coolest Native Aquarium Ever at the National Trout Centre in Turangi!! There will be at least seven huge dedicated natives tanks, showing different habitat types and including most of the species and all the families in the North Island. I am their fish geek so it will be awesome Not going to give away too much here, but will keep you posted as it nears completion. :bounce:

Oh wow! Good luck for all the healing and surgeries!! Most curious, I have never pondered that before....

yep, it is getting down to 'name the freshwater critter that ISN'T on the threatened list! Currently 90% of our freshwater fish are on the list, and it is undergoing an update at the moment, so who know what it will be after that It creates ethical problems for me and my book. Most of my purpose is to make people aware that these fish exist, encourage them to learn about them and their habitat, and realise that we need to do something NOW about the state of our freshwaters before it is too late. But I want to have the book ethical, so I am not including the rarer species. Better get it published before they are all gone! am editing tonight.... Did you know that 90% of our rivers are not reliably safe to swim in? WHY IS THERE NO PUBLIC OUTCRY?! This is our WATER! And yet dairy farm intensification continues. Point source discharge continues. Stock are still allowed to enter streams. :evil:

oh awesome! Great to hear there was a good response I had a meeting with an insurance broker who was not my usual one. She was astonishingly pushy and was not interested in what I wanted. At one point I had to butt in and say "I. Am. Not. Interested. In. Kiwi. Saver" and she still kept talking about it! It ended with me agreeing to her doing some research on my behalf simply to get her out of the house. I immediately emailed my usual broker, who rang me within half an hour. The end result was they fired her, my complaint was the last straw. It is hard sometimes getting the guts up to do this, but sometimes it is just what the employer or business needs to know.

wow, that is really cool! I would never do barebottomed unless I absolutely had to, but that is an awesome idea. Makes it look much more attractive and 'finished'. (Imagine having flounder on a checkered tile base. Apparently sand flounder will take on the pattern of a fishing net, even down to the correct mesh size, given a few days adjustment.)

Whetu, check out my video here of my mudfish tank. It has a thick peat substrate and leaf litter on top. Also bits of wood they wriggle under. No filter because, as you found, it would just get sucked up. It gets 50% water changes every week (or two). Just in case you were thinking of trying it again.... I am a big fan of leaving filters for long periods. That is how they are supposed to work. A sponge over the inlet is a good idea to stop solids getting into the filter, but other than that, the bacteria should just be left to do their thing.

Have you seen that clear resin stuff with stones embedded in it? It can be done like a super chunky bowl etc. Looks like water and stones with nothing holding it up. Anyway, I have often wondered about that to give the impression of a substrate for when people need the convenience of no substrate but want it to look a little bit nicer.

Yeah, ostracods. They have two hard shells and tiny legs that come out the middle to swim with. Very cool. My understanding was they were hard and not really eaten, but if something does eat them - great! The 'ostrac' part probably comes from the greek 'ostraca' meaning broken pottery. The word 'ostracism' comes from an Athenian system they used to have each year when they could vote which citizen got sent into exile for ten years. They wrote the name of the person they wanted ostracised on a piece of broken pottery as their vote. Anyone want to return to that system? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism You see the same word in other places too. The early armoured fish were ostracoderms ('brokenpottery-skin') Um yeah, that was the long answer.... :oops: but now you will never forget what they are called

Awesome! Really pleased to hear that, Grant! (Caryl, you must really have his arm twisted high up his back )

No, freshwater crays prefer cold water (room temp and preferably well below).

There are native freshwater crayfish, easily found in streams etc around the place and make great pets. Bear in mind they are becoming threatened. Do an archive search and you will find heaps of info on them. Also use the Maori name for them, koura, as a search term. Very cool critters!

A really interesting article on why fastwater fish suffer in standard set-ups: http://aquaweb.pair.com/forums/archives ... ?read=1253 It is quite complex, but don't let that put you off. You can skim the more tangled bits. The general gist is that because fastwater fish have evolved in a high oxygen environment, they have got haemoglobin with a low affinity for oxygen. Put them in a typical tank with low flow and thus low dissolved oxygen, water that is too warm (for coldwater fish) and far too many tankmates and they basically can't get enough oxygen. There seem to be lots of fastwater fish in the trade that people don't realise are from these sorts of habitats and certainly they aren't treated as any different. I think plecos, borneo suckers and various loaches are fastwater. Does anyone have a list?

Oooh I didn't know they would eat the pupae! I hadn't seen any beetles in a while but I did find a pupa the other night. Just sifted through, found one pupa and no eaten ones. Also a few live beetles, so that is promising! I do suspect it is most likely temperature related. Most things slow down over winter. But will defintely be providing moisture more often.

.....oooooooooooooooooooooooo! That would sure eat a lot of food!

interesting surgery! Yes, you can cut fins. Just make sure you have very sharp small scissors (eg nail scissors) and clean them up first. A large fish has fins that are quite tough to cut through. You (and the fish) can feel every fin ray! But yours look little so it shouldn't be too hard. The important bit for fin regrowth is not to affect the line where the fin joins the body. As long as there is a little bit of fin left it will grow back fine.

yeah, just do what Caryl did and call me out of the blue saying she was turning up in ten minutes!

The nightlife is amazingly pathetic, with far too much testosterone-fuelled idiocy and drunk, stumbling morons who think being drunk and stumbling is a sign of their utter coolness.... but that may rock your boat. Apparently there is decent trout fishing in the Manawatu. Do a search, there will be sites that tell you where to go. I see trout feeding when I look over the manawatu bridge, very neat to watch! Haven't heard of any paintball facilities... Definitely check out Wet Pets and Animates. Wet Pets has quite a spectacular fishy section. What sort of things do you like doing? That would help with making some recommendations.

wow that is impressive! (I had to peel a dried banded kokopu off the wall behind a tank once

entirely dependant on: the fish the ambient temperature the dampness of the area humidity Basically the gills can work as long as they are damp. Some fish can get a large proportion of their oxygen from their skin. I have heard of goldfish being out of water for hours on wet carpet. One of my koaro was under the couch covered in cat hair for 24 hours and was fine when I popped him back in the tank. But when another fish tried that trick in summer it was crunchy within a few hours. Native mudfish have evolved to be out of the water for months when their wetlands dry up. They just need to be a little bit damp to survive.

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hehe Really I am just self-taught over the last few years, and now know good places to look things up The Trout's Larder (book) has a very accessible guide to the main groups of stream critters, with basic drawings and photographs. Awesome! I imagine they are like stoneflies. I had to pin stoneflies and mayflies for my entomology paper last semester - evil things! So damned thin and squishy!! Look amazing under the microscope though. If anyone is interested in learning various major groups of native fish, inverts and plants, there are some rather good large posters available free here: http://limsoc.rsnz.org/index.php/publications/posters/ The fish and inverts ones are great, but the plants one is a little vague (guess I am not really into plants... it may work for you)

Most home aquaria have a selection of critters that were not intentionally put in there, and most owners are unaware they are there. Someone did a study of this in NZ and I can't quite remember the numbers, but I think petshops had a higher number of unintentional critters and some were previously not known to be present in NZ, making them more of a border-control issue than previously realised. I came home with two dobsonfly larvae and chucked them in a tank with some feisty kokopu who had never seen one before. One was bitten and spat out, and the fish ignored them after that - very odd! I wonder if they have some natural inclination to avoid them? Apparently the pupae are excellent 'flies' for trout, but not the larvae.

(oh and native to NZ, there is only one species: Archichauliodes diversus)

Dobsonfly larva. With those huge manidbles they are colloquially called 'toebiters'. They eat other stream invertebrates. They only have six actual legs, like all insects. The extra 'legs' are gills. They live for 2-3 years in water then pupate in damp hollows out of the water. The adult looks like stonefly adults and only lives a few days. The female can have a wingspan of 7cm and the males are half this. A photo of an adult: http://thenewzealandsite.com/photo.php/1794/ I SOOOOO want to see one! How on earth did it get in there? Live plants/food?

Sounds like a great way to kill them all when the tank is so sick! I would know do that if I knew the aquarium water was awesomely fabulously healthy. (Mine regularly get 40% changes, or more depending) Why is the pH the crucial factor? It that about the ammonia thing like Sharn said? If so I guess that would make bit of a difference.... but hard to predict the outcome.