Stella

By two hours, is that the travelling time between your old house and new house? Wow, that will be a mission. Probably less fiddly if you can get big buckets with lids. Bags are ok but annoying to open/close etc. Really all you can do it strip everything out of the tanks, move it all, reassemble at the other end. Only you know what you have, so make a list of everything that needs to be done and figure out the best order to do it in. This REALLY helps on the day. If you have filters, the period of time they are unplugged for will probably kill off a lot of the good bacteria, so I suggest you treat the tanks as if they are brand new (ie LOTS of water changes, little feeding). Anyone you can get to babysit some fish? I moved recently, 2x 4ft tanks and 1x 3ft tank. I moved all my furniture and stuff on one day, and the next day for the tanks, and the next day for the final cleaning. It was only 1.6km up the road, but still a mission. I did each tank separately, which I think made it easier. More sleep would also have helped!!

You probably just found your own answer. New tanks can be death traps. Have you learned about cycling a fish tank? (not sure how long you have been involved with fish. I recently took a piece of wood from a river for my fish tank. Remember fish diseases are not likely to survive without fish being present*. SO with this bit of wood, I just had it in a bucket of water for a week or two to keep it waterlogged, but allow for anything on it to die. (*if they do, they will probably be in your tank anyway, but they are opportunistic and wit for your fish to be vulnerable, we are currently surrounded by the most cold and flu viruses right now, but people's immune systems are stronger over summer so we tend not to get sick from them)

limiting the time your aquarium light is on can help. Also if you have a lighthood and can open up part of it without risking fish escape, this will let some heat out.

Initially I thought ostracods (seed shrimp) but then I noticed the subject said 'snail' Do they look like tiny limpets with an almost transparent shell? Never more than 3mm (at a stretch)? Probably Ferrissia (I think the species name is rivularis but not sure) Completely harmless, usually come in on aquarium plants. Generally never noticed, they common in aquaria. Exotic.

It is a slightly confusing system, but handy: messages go to your outbox after you have sent them, then your sentbox when the other person has seen them. Handy way of knowing if someone has looked at their message yet. Personally I don't know how your fish compares to a healthy discus, am not a tropical fish person. Someone will

You can still give us a description here. If you have figured out how to write a PM, go to the bottom of the page and hit 'submit', just like writing a post here.

That is exceedingly good advice! Very little is said about the aesthetics of things, so bits like that we usually learn slowly through trial and error.

I forgot to say, if anyone wants to join us on sunday, please PM me. Shame you can't come down Ian, but I understand How are your little bullies going?

Wow, very cool! Thanks for posting this (another place I can sell my book when I finish it....) Good to see more of this happening.

I barely had enough time to get everything done when I was unemployed! Starting as a student soon.... What are you studying? I am doing a graduate diploma in ecology. Yeah, all my fish are natives :bounce:

Flagyl is another name for metronidazole, not a disease. What are the actual SYMPTOMS this fish is showing? You say it looks sick but also that it has a good appetite and is swimming well..... I wouldn't go treating anything with antibiotics before you know what you are doing.

EWWWWWWWW! That is just WRONG!

hehe yeah, the MAIN massey ;P :roll: I was at the stream today, I eat my lunch there each day. Only see trout during the day, and watch damselflies. Today I actually saw an EEL! So different at night BTW if anyone is free on sunday my friends and I will be poking around in Lake Papaitonga and Ohau River (just south of Levin). Ira, will probably be more worth the enormous drive from the Hutt! SHould be finding a lot of interesting species!

phoenix, you have too much time to spare.... Thanks for telling us how you did it - good trick! It is so cool having them feed from your fingers. My mudfish only feed from my fingers (partly a food-would-get-lost-otherwise thing), my kokopu used to, and finally I got a shortjaw kokopu to try it (though admittedly I hadn't thought to attempt it before) Food is such a big motivational factor!

I have been thinking it would be handy to have an email list for palmy people (since we don't have a club and it is unlikely to happen). That was we can get in contact easily if something breaks and we need help urgently, have fish to trade, want to plan a meet or similar. Not a message board or yahoogroup(etc) but a simple email list. Anyone know how to set one up?

LOL cute! How did you do it?

I am leading a native fish spotlighting trip on SATURDAY 14th MARCH, probably around 8pm. To the Turitea stream by Massey (bledisloe reserve) Will be a good intro to fish hunting Put it in your diaries (Technically the trip is a Forest and Bird one, but everyone is always welcome!) (edit: got the day wrong)

That is great Joleit! These issues are big learning stages and I am glad this one has gone well. Probably the whitespotcure OR the salt on its own would have done the trick, but probably little harm in mixing the two (generally it is discouraged to mix meds, unless you know what you are doing) Still keep treating for 3-4 days after the last spot falls. If you are worried about not wanting to use more than the described doses of whitespot cure, simply discontinue that, leave the salt in and after 4 days do a waterchange and not add more salt. The salt will decrease with each waterchange. Carbon is fairly useless in small doses, needs to be replaced regularly and personally I can't be bothered. Others swear by it. Carbon absorbs stuff (chemicals?) from the water, and has a rather short life. If it is exposed to the air it will be absorbing stuff too. Probably best to throw away the carbon that was in the water.

....amongst other things! A friend of mine got malaria when he was overseas. The symptoms only set in once he got home. Of course the hospital (army and public) had very little idea of what to do with him.

Hi Craig and Welcome! We have a good number of palmy people on the forum now! (no actual club though)

You are HIGHLY unlikely to transfer disease from a fishless body of water to a fishy one. Any that would transfer are probably in most waterbodies anyway (including your tank) and only affect the fish when their immune systems are down. Poisons..... well, if this is your backyard you should know what is going on in it. If you worry about stuff from the atmosphere, time and again the air inside houses has been shown to be much more polluted by various agents than outside. The only nasty I can think of that could be transferred in hydra, but usually (I think) they are found with aquatic plants, so unlikely to be in a plantless tub (confirmation please?) Personally I run it through a fine sieve so I am not putting dirty water into my tanks. Similar method, different reason

Hehehe if a person has one interest/hobby from the list below, chances are they have another hobby from the list below! Fish Plants Invertebrates Reptiles (and turtles etc what is the group name)

Thanks for posting the links. The first article I find extremely difficult to follow. Makes sweeping claims then weak arguments to back it up. Or maybe my brain is tired. The second article I found to be similar. I DID like the third article! Much more confident style and not seeming to mix fact with fiction. My favourite site on fishkeeping has one on salt which I have found very handy: http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/health/salt.shtml I don't know that the articles are *not* recommending salt per se, but saying a lot of common recommendations and understandings are wrong. It simply doesn't have as many uses as are claimed. For me it is awesome on ich and columnaris, and can help with the odd other bacterial issue, and I feel it is safer for me and the fish than commercial chemicals. I used to do the thing of routinely adding salt as a 'preventative' till I found it was baseless. Another change I have made recently is doing the whitespot dose of salt when I take wild fish into quarantine. I have ummed and ahhed over this for ages, as only a few lots have ever brought it in. But I figure now that the risk of the parasite, and the even longer treatment time required, is worse than unnecessarily treating fish (you don't know they have it until there is an outbreak). I would not do this with the commercial chemicals, as I think they are harder on the fish. (struggling getting the right words today)

hehehe yup, and it looks even bigger when you measure it out! If you have not put it in already, dissolve it first and add it in slowly over an hour or three. Not sure how much of a difference it makes, but possibly less of a shock to the system. It is a fairly decent dosage, so stand by for any fish objecting, and do a waterchange or yoik them out if need be. I haven't had that myself, but you have different species I have no experience with. Remember your stones etc take up a chunk of the literage, and you don't have the tank filled right up. Stones usually take up 10% but my tanks are real rockeries so I subtract 20%.

I am not sure what those fish are or what they are supposed to look like.... but the top two photos, the tufts from between the fins, that looks like columnaris. Tis a bacteria that lives in the water anyway and gets stuck in when the fishes' immune systems are low. I usually use salt at a rate of 1 tsp per litre to clear that up. Can be a rather nasty disease and the acute form can kill very swiftly (24hrs, and usually the fish look awful by the time they die). The chronic form takes a bit longer, like a week or two, before it gets nasty/fatal. Not sure if that fits with the other symptoms.