Stella

Someone had a link to this really incredible video of a goldfish who had been trained to push a mini soccer ball into a goal for a food reward... Edit: found one similar:

I use fans on my tanks over summer. It cools through evaporation, so yes, aim it at the water. (I use small desk fans, unscrew the base and simply sit the fan face-down on top of the tank, with a gap between the lids wide enough to hold the fan. Get an RCT switch.... The evaporation is not a constant rate. It has a greater cooling effect when: The air is dry (can't evaporate so fast when it is really humid) it is warm (washing dries faster on a hot day) However fans also blow atmospheric pollution onto the surface of the tank, quickly building up an oily slick. Use paper towels to skim this off the surface. If you have a turbulent surface (from bubbler, filter water pouring through the surface) the scum will not form, but is being dissolved into the water gross. Waterchange this out and be REALLY CAREFUL what goes into your air. Air fresheners? Fly spray? Smoke (inc incense)? It won't drop the temp much but can drop it a couple of degrees. In my experience it doesn't do much for 2ft tanks, but can have an effect on 4ft tanks. Effectiveness depends on setup/room/etc. Cooling the area would definitely have an effect. THe heat gets into the tank from the surrounding area. If the room is cold the tank is cold and vice versa. I have air conditioning for the worst parts of summer, but it costs a bucketload.

Turtlemantaken.. wow Inanga usually only get to about 10-12cm, but in captive conditions where spawning is not going to happen they can grow bigger and live much longer than one year. The best I saw was a 15cm fish that was apparently 5 years old! I would be astounded for a kokopu whitebait to grow to 20cm in a few months, but not sure what the usual is. I would expect a really chunky 10cm fish after a year. Maybe it is possible, I don't know. However the surface action you describe sounds much more like inanga. Could you please post a photo of your pond? it sounds AWESOME! Must be huge to have a jetty... Preacher, glad to hear your fish are going well!

When I get a bacterial bloom like that I try to do heaps of waterchanges to get rid of it. The bacteria are sucking up the oxygen, potentially competing with the fish (depends how bad it is)

Yeah, that sounds like what I was imagining. McDowall's big book (they all have virtually the same name) has an interesting section on parasites. Apparently in summer when temps get high it is possible for (usually lake) bullies to get such bad whitespot there are mass deaths! I have caught bullies in the wild with a few, but it is much less likely to cause death (large waterbody, usually lots of current, less prolonged stress... aside from all the predators....) I wonder if it is harder for the freeswimming whitespot to get a hold of a big trout? Thick scales etc. Might be on gills instead. Almost all of the parasites in the wild here are native ones (or are all around the world, like whitespot). Most have a multi-host lifecycle, first in an invertebrate, then in the fish that eats the invertebrate, then sometimes in the bird that eats the fish. Something in trout seems to arrest their development. It is possible trout are actually benefiting the natives: acting as a 'sink' for parasites.

Furan 2 or salt at 1 tsp per litre. Not sure what tonic is, haven't used it myself. Cottonmouth is also known as columnaris (can help with searching for info). It is a NASTY disease. Personally I would move the actually sick fish into a hospital tank so it won't infect others. I would add the salt to the main tank just in case others may have the start of it. Do some serious waterchanges on the tank. This is an opportunistic pathogen, lives in the water all the time and pounces when a fish is immunologically compromised. You need to figure out what caused it in the first place too. Good luck, may be too late though

Totally legal to take them, we have thrashed this topic out here a number of times. I am keen for the trip

Very true!! Welcome Donald

Kuhli's are scaleless, right? My kokopu are scaleless. They can be totally shredded with skin falling off their sides from fighting (they CHOOSE to scrap sometimes), and seriously, by the next day it is gone! That skin heals so fast! Now I do keep a very close eye on them, just in case it turns into an infection (hasn't happened so far). An infection will look thicker, sometimes hairy, and grow. Obviously a healthy wound won't grow... On scaleless fish grazes usually look like infections, but you get to tell the difference pretty fast. Salt is excellent. You can do a dip or a bath. A dip is about 1 tbsp in a litre of water and hold the fish in the net in the water for as long as it is ok, to hopefully around a minute or two (count in your head). All fish react differently. Don't stress if it rolls over, just pop it back in the tank. For baths, just add salt to the tank at a rate of 1/2 or 1 tsp per litre, depending on the severity of the infection. Leave it until it is sorted (replace removed salt after each waterchange). So many people say to avoid salt with anticaking agents or iodine. No real science behind this. Doesn't harm the fish at all. Also 1tsp of rock salt is quite a different weight to 1 tsp table salt. Hope that helps

It really is amazing what a dark background and/or substrate can do for a tank. Really sets off the fish, even the little brown ones! Certainly at least blacking out the back where the rockwork doesn't cover would help. Depends on how much room you have. Coloured paper could work, and if you got a paper similar or slightly darker than the rock colour it would hide it perfectly. Doing native kinda-biotope tanks my gravel and rocks all come from the stream the fish came from (sorta). You can't beat that for a natural look! That said, it sounds like you are doing the plant thing properly and they should take over in no time The gravel looks kinda blue..... is it actually blue? (btw I love this new feature of telling me before I submit a post if someone else has already made a new post!!)

That would be wonderful! Thanks

Cool background! You ask for suggestions... the only thing that strikes me is the background is totally disassociated from the substrate. If you found a rock or three that looked like the background, and partially burried them in the substrate it would look a lot more.... real? (I say one or three rocks because even numbers of things tend to look less believable) Is there no lid? No risk of them jumping out? I can imagine it would be a very peaceful tank to watch. How long has it been set up?

HaNs, 30+ smelt in a tank WOULD be awesome! I have never actually kept smelt. Never had the space or organisation to do it. You need to be really organised as they do not cope with stress one bit. Apparently they transport ok if really chilled out (literally) Caught them only once, really really pretty shiny fish. I find (in the aquarium) when there are no clearly dominant bullies, they will play this little game of taking each other's spots. Fish One takes the spot of Fish Two, who takes the spot of Fish Three, all as if choreographed! Try that in a tank with a bit of hierachy and someone gets their arse kicked.... A study was done on submerged waterplants in certain lakes and they constructed a platform that was anchored to the ground and suspended midwater. It was full of pots of plants. The bullies took over, pulled out the plants, excavated the soil and started breeding in it like high-density bully spawning apartments! Bullies rock. If you want to see fascinating interactions, 'safe' territorialism and spawning behaviours, get bullies

Bummer, oh well, better luck next time! Do let the local DOC office know. Maybe they already know, but better to tell them again that to assume they know when they don't.

Awesome tank! Those plants look great. I have been thinking of growing some kind of small native rush in my mudfish tank. Would give them (even more) places to hide... So the nitrate gets used as nitrogen for plant growth, is that right?

Do whatever works for you, and works for your tank. Either method should work. I am not sure what the numbers mean for the tests, but I understand nitrate can get much higher than that and not be causing problems, so it is not a big thing right now, but clearly the tank is producing more nitrate than your waterchanges are able to remove, so if you don't do more somehow the nitrate would continue to build. Is the nitrate usually lower and has recently gone up or what?

Go to the library and get out any book on NZ freshwater fish by McDowall (or google, there are lots of descriptive 'native fish 101 sites out there, but I find a book is handier to flick back and forth while getting used to them) D'oh! And we now have one here! http://www.fnzas.org.nz/index.php?PG=nativefish (though there are still some mixed up descriptions we need to iron out) If you can get some photos we can ID them much more easily (photos side on is best, ziplock bags can be handy in the field for this! But from above is ok too) Good luck! I love hearing about other people's native fish hunts

Tiny trout look pretty thin from above, not much like bullies. Did yours school, Alan? From what I have seen of tiny trout they skitter about in the shallows, settling to face upstream, but any appearance of 'schooling' would be from all wanting to be in the same microhabitat. Hope you are able to get out to the stream again soon, Supasi!

Enzoom1, I am really interested in these schooling bullies. How do they do it? Could you give a good description please? I mean, bullies don't normally swim about higher up in the water (with the possible exception of dominant ones). They usually sit on the bottom and move about in very short spurts. I could definitely imagine in a lake the bullies swimming off a short distance when scared by a diver could look like schooling. I am not trying to sound totally dubious, I just don't understand how they would do it. (edit for spelling...)

From my understanding increasing the filtration won't remove nitrate. It is the end result of the bacterial process and will simply build and build unless it is removed/diluted with waterchanges. I think plants take some up, but I don't keep plants so I bypassed that info... Pretty much the answer to everything in this hobby is to do more water changes! :lol:

Have you seen the size of inanga? Though I daresay they would try....! Good ideas on the moth traps.

AWESOME! Thanks for posting! What is the current like in there? If I ever tired of native and decided to go tropical ( :lol: :lol: :lol:) I would so have to get them!

I ride a motorcycle.... You say that your problem is not so much about the $280 but about the signs being tiny and the legitimacy of the venture. It sounds like you are angry about the clamping. I appreciate that it is not your car, but possibly someone close to you? Be careful. Don't do anything in the spur of the moment while running on adrenaline which may be silly when seen in the light of day. Yes it is an outrageous amount to pay and seems absurd for the supermarket to encourage that (I bet good customers go elsewhere after it happens to someone they know!) but I think it unlikely that your theory the clamp becomes the car owner's is going to work. Leaving the wheel and clamp behind might work, but surely there is something against it (it must have been tried before!). And is the fine really more than the cost of a new wheel, tyre, time, effort etc? (fun though it would be to drive off!) Not trying to be a spoilsport, maybe just devil's advocate....

Weird..... Inanga can be small for a while, but they really don't look like bullies. By looking like bullies you mean what exactly? How did they behave (schooling tightly, loosely etc?) HaNs says he has seen bullies schooling in Lake Taupo. I don't exactly disbelieve him..... but I have never heard of it elsewhere and am not sure how they would do it (as in they usually sit on the ground and move in very short spurts). What about smelt? But they look exactly like inanga from above... Actually gambusia might be possible.... I have heard there are some around Wanganui (KILLKILLKILL!) and with the fat fronts they could look bully-esque and are small.... Intriguing, keep us informed!

I tell you, downsizing can be as exciting as upsizing! The sheer relief of not having quite so much requiring your attention can be wonderful 8) Hope the next period goes smoothly and disease-free for you.