Stella

A photo of Abigail's black flounder (or "wee predacious flying carpet"!!) 11cm total length. I want me one!! Go on, more details of how you keep these, please

:lol: awesome!! What do you feed him? Does he get on well with others?

Hi Abigail, I so want one!! Though the tanks are looking quite shabby at the moment, shall have to put off getting any new fish to one day in the future when I have a more settled schedule... (The latest addition, a few months back, was a dwarf galaxias. Seems to be a real morning person, and totally hyperactive. I swear they are small because they put all their energy into swimming really fast instead of growing!) Do you know what the black patch on kokopu etc is? I have noticed the patch on my shortjaws has a slightly different texture to the rest of their body.

yeah, no question: it's a banded (note the bands

Yeah, they tend not to play well with others. It CAN be done, but usually results in fighting and one fat cray. Many hiding places and a large ground area helps.

hmm.... I am not great with maths but.... Simply guessing has a 50:50 chance of being right/wrong anyway. This test claims a 20-30% chance of the answer being wrong. Looks to me like it actually tells you nothing. Any number of things in the mother's diet could affect this. A urinary tract infection would also indicate one sex or t'other, I can't remember which. And it seems highly unlikely that the sex of the baby would be able to change something about the mother like that. About as believable as saying acid urine means the baby will have brown eyes. Of course wit ha 50:50 chance, the website will be teeming with people saying how it was accurate. (the scans all said I was a boy, but the wedding-ring pendulum said I was a girl - the pendulum must be more accurate! :roll: ) Good thing you didn't pay the $135. Of course there is no harm in a little fun.

Definitely inanga. Kokopu are much chunkier and deeper and inanga are more streamlined, even when small. Kokopu vs inanga: Kokopu fins are much rounder. Inange fins are smaller, finer and seem more spread out. Kokopu can sit on a surface our of the water (like a supported net) flat like a lizard. Inanga lie on their sides and flap around. Inanga tend to have 'leopard spotting' across most of the body, mostly on the upper surfaces. (you can lump koaro in with kokopu here) My tricks with kokopu: Bandeds have vertical stripes that trail out top and bottom, and the stripes are clearer or more concentrated where the tail flexes. The pic earlier of the banded is a little weird with the sort of 'spotting' around its head. As they get bigger the markings become more confined to the tail region, and generally less dramatic. Small giants have markings that are wider and have a similar definition ALL the way around the edge of each marking, ie they do not trail away to nothing. Small ones often have a pattern of |.|.|.|. along the lateral line. As they get bigger this breaks up and eventually the whole body is randomly marked with spots and crescents. Shortjaws are tricky. They have vague spotting and marbleing, but nothing your could describe as a pattern. The main thing to look for is the jaw in profile (if you can get the sod to sit still!). The snout is kinda blunt and curved with a slightly undercut jaw. Bandeds and giants have both 'lips' meeting at the tip of the snout. Koaro are chunky like the kokopu, but the head is more dorso-ventrally flattened, making the head more pointy. Awesome little faces, with small interested-looking eyes and a strange habit of snapping their way up and down the aquarium. They are quite mottled, with a dark grey/olive on a silver background, often with suggestions of chevrons along the side. .........er, yeah, that was way more than I intended to write. Looking great, Livingart!!

I haven't seen many shrimp, but I have noticed the bigger ones tend to have more colour like this. ALL the little ones are fertile boys and ALL the big ones are fertile girls. I used to often wonder what happened during the 'intermediate' stage. Now I realised they would probably be male right up until the point they moulted into being a girl. People often feel different emotionally wearing different clothes. Imagine getting dressed one day and discovering you had changed sexes....

LOL cute! I hope he didn't get any paint drift on the glass... (correctly: 'galaxiids' I tend to forget the second 'i'. To confuse matters the family name is Galaxias, with one 'i')

He has still got it. Feeding fine so it obviously isn't causing him any pain (though *I* wish they would stop biting so hard!) I think it is shrinking a little. Not too worried about it now, hopefully it will just fade away.

So it lost that big area of fin at the same time? I find natives heal up really well from injuries. I always keep a really close eye on it but nothing dramatic has ever happened. Looks to me like some sort of bruising from the fish trying to get away from the fin being grabbed. Bruising shouldn't cause any problems, and if your water quality is good and the fish are healthy the fin will grow back with little fuss. My old inanga had most of his tail bitten off by a koura once. It was right along the boundary between the fin and the body. Amazingly it started growing back. However the fish was ancient (3+ years) and was T struggling to keep him in any sort of decent physical condition, so it took forever to grow. Impressive photo. Most inanga photos consist of a blurry tail disappearing out of the shot!

Commons usually go to sea, but they don't have to. They are finding with some of the diadromous native species with sea access that some actually haven't been to sea. Will take more work to unravel quite what is going on here. Commons are not blunt like the Cran's, they are quite obviously tapered towards to snout. Cran's females are less clear, but definitely not tapered. We decided that you also had koaro or something, didn't we? The galaxiids possibly do have a higher oxygen requirement. Bullies are certainly very active but not quite as active as the galaxiids. Oh, I have recently added a dwarf galaxiid to the collection. Nutter fish! It looks like it is constantly panicking - breathing fast and flapping their pectorals fast while staying on one spot. It is just how they are. I swear they are dwarfed simply by putting all their energy into flapping! Then it will disappear for two weeks without applying for leave. Most inconsiderate. Cute wee fish though, I would like to get more as apparently they school a little.

One of my fish has this weird 'blister' on its face. It is longer than it is high and is centered under the eye. The eye seems fine. It has been there for a few days, and hasn't changed in that time. It really just looks like a big, fluid-filled blister. All I can think of is they are quite rough at feeding time. I feed them by hand and they can almost fit the tips of my fingers in their mouths. They give a good go at biting them off! I wonder if it could have damaged something. Anyone seen anything similar? Thanks

Oh that is very cool! Neat to know they went for it straight away. There are some pools I know with shortjaw and giant kokopu. Hopefully when the rain stops (ie next summer) I will go back and was planning to take some mealworm beetles. I might just do ox heart instead! I have a 2cm Cran's fry, it doesn't have much by the way of markings either. They seem to be very nondescript for a very long time. Presumably yours are Cran's or upland, being the ones that don't have to go to sea as fry. (Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier, I had to go cold turkey from a few sites so I could focus on uni stuff.)

Mine get a stable diet of heart meat (with all the fat cut off, frozen then cut up into bite-sized pieces). Live food when I can find it - daphnia, wrigglers, worms, mealworm beetles etc You will find they waste a lot of the flake food, and don't really tuck into it with much vigour. Apparently crayfish use plant-derived food for energy and animal-food (insects, fish etc) is used to grow. So a small koura needs lots of protein to grow, and larger ones need less, but they all got nuts for it (like us with fat and sugar!). Easy foods are sinking carnivore pellets, heart meat etc. Live food is usually too quick to get away, though worms are great fun. Otherwise frozen peas are a perennial favourite. Torries are great. Not sure what size your tank is etc, but be really careful with temps over summer, they can be very prone to issues. They take a while to get the idea of sinking foods (they are shaped to take food from underneath them) but they get it with practise and are awesome to watch feeding. Haven't done the shrimp thing myself but I am told it works. I am just dubious as to them being much more than water (ever seen a dried shrimp?) Oh, I used to used bloodworms. Apart from being expensive I discovered they just don't have enough in them for fast growing fish (kokopu), that is when I got on to heart meat.

I thought inanga were able to climb these, which is one of the reasons they were so excited about them I was talking to Bruno about them last November, and I remember he was encouraging a master's student to do something with them for her inanga/fishpass topic. I know inanga are useless climbers, but I am mostly sure he said they could climb them (though probably not to great heights). So exciting, as this makes a really easy way to improve bad culverts. I just hope it won't be seen as a way of avoiding putting in proper culverts. There are many other migratory fish that would be unable to climb them, but then again, if they were in a ramp, rather than hanging, it might work for most.

I suspect that article is quite old. They can get billions of larvae but they can't get them past 14 days (ie past the yolk-sac stage). Another interesting thing that has come out of this is that they have got their post-spawning eels to feed again (in the wild they die, presumably). Eels are on very shaky ground right now: longfins are being pushed to extinction by commercial fishing and shortfins are following close behind. Some might see this as a way of helping BUT we won't know for many decades if the resulting eels can breed naturally (and there are MANY levels of complication with this one, you don't just put two eels in a bag). By that stage eels will probably be extinct in NZ anyway. And the point of this research is to get glass eels. That will have no effect on the demand for 'real' eel meat, so it won't be a way of 'farming' eels to reduce pressure on wild stocks. There is no glass eel fishery in NZ (there simply aren't enough anywhere) and to grow the tiddlers up to eating size will take decades. Awesome stuff indeed, but significant practical issues both commercially and conservation-ly.

bastards!!! :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: Sadly your story is very common The one over a metre long would have been very old. Do you have a way of contacting them and letting them know the reality? Without people standing up for these amazing creatures they WILL go extinct. We are just watching it happen.

Totally! The spiral ones are very cool but yes, I think the straight ones show off the technique better Did you know somewhere people pull the critter out of its shell then place it in a tank with crushed up precious stones and gold dust so the caddises make new home out of that, then they use the case as jewellery or something.... Seems kinda humiliating to the caddises (caddii?) but the results are really pretty.

I feel your pain! I only has six samples to sort through and they took 2-3 hours each. (the worst had about a hundred stoney cased caddis that were less than 2mm long. Just when you thought you had got them all you spot another.) I am so not doing anything to do with invertebrates for my masters (if I survive that long). Though I have come to the conclusion that no matter what your topic is in ecology, you will get wet, muddy and go blind counting. At least it sounds like you had a good bunch of people to work with. I can't believe the number of third year ecology student who continually whine "this is boring, I'm hungry, I want to go". :roll: :evil:

elvers can climb quite impressive and sheer waterfalls. They get out of the water and inch their way up the wet sides (ie not in the flow), clinging on with surface tension. Note also that a two foot eel is about twenty years old, and they grow incredibly slowly. Also they grow much much slower in low-quality streams. Eels breed once, at the end of their lives (which can be 60-100 years, for a female, males are much younger). They migrate down the streams to the sea, then hundreds of kilometers out to the Pacific (we are not sure where), where they spawn and die. The tiny eels (which are shaped like willow-leaves) make it back to NZ ONLY in the case of the longfin eel, or to NZ, western Australia and surrounding islands in the case of the shortfin eel. Commercial eel fishing is a serious threat to our eel species and they are now on the threatened list, despite govt claims that it is sustainable. It is a 'quota managed' fishery, but given that the fishermen have (almost) never been able to fill the quota and usually the annual catch is well below it, you can't say the quota is doing anything to preserve the fishery. Some surveys of eel population in single rivers have counted circa 450 eels. Sounds like heaps eh? However of those, only circa 5 are female..... hardly a workable population. The reason for this is that females live in the streams for so much longer, and thus have to avoid the fishermen for longer (and eels are really easy to catch) also the females grow bigger and are therefore much more desirable to catch. We are now seeing hardly any elvers entering the streams. The fishermen say they are still catching heaps (albeit much less than before). Of course they are, today's adult eels migrated upstream decades ago. If no eels reproduce from now onwards, they will still be able to catch plenty of eels for decades to come, but there won't be any replacement.

Kewl keepsake. Tis often hard remembering how big they were when they are gone. I doubt the 40 years estimate though. Given the pre-eminent native fish scientist only feels confident enough to write that they are "long lived, perhaps more than twenty years", putting a figure like forty years on an individual seems somewhat arbitrary. Fish can be aged by looking at tiny disk-like bones (otoliths) in their 'ears', they grow concentrically as the fish grows, and rings are visible like with trees. Not sure of anything done with giant kokopu or other galaxiid otoliths, but generally a fish lives the harder it is to count the rings. The outer and middle ones are easier but the inner (older) ones get vague.

lol I thought they were fast growing! I guess it depends on what you are comparing them with.... At about one year old they are circa 10cm, but really chunky. These fish get really FAT, so to grow much in length they need to put on a hell of a lot of bulk. They slow down as they get bigger. Livingart, I hope the kokopu wasn't in its hole when the slip happened! Mine (20cm) was eating daphnia last night, looked ridiculous for the size of it! (they were for the bullies). He is about 2.5 years old, but there was a stunting issue when he was a post-whitebait (bloodworms are NOT nutritious) and had a health issue recently and is only just putting back the fat reserves.

Had a few people wonder where I had got to! Uni is so frantically busy, it is really stressful! So much catching up to do (I was able to jump in at third year level and skip out doing the entire degree, but it is seriously in the deep end!). Pretty much my entire life (including/particularly my social life) have been put on hold. I have barely been finding time to eat/sleep properly so have now got a cold. Clever! The book is on hold too. Makes me want to cry as it is SO close to being done. So yeah, I am still reading the forum, but trying to restrict myself to native fish topics in an attempt to make time.

I always assumed it was discovered during a study on what they eat.... not sure though.