Stella

No I have never seen them before. Know virtually nothing about them and google is not being particularly helpful. They sound like the small ones would be incredibly cute though... Alan, what sort of tank did you have them in? How do they eat (their mouths are sideways!)? What sort of substrate? I am surprised they would stick to the side of the tank!

Um, yeah, that is pretty much the whole question.... .... oh and how, what were they like, what do they eat and all that stuff....

algae going nuts, bacterial blooms (cloudy water) and general instability are all very common with recently set-up tanks. Also, does your new tank have a light and your old tank not? Algae is more common in lit tanks.

If it is outside I would steer away from poly. Would look great for about five minutes before the elements and stray cats started picking away at it... Ooh ooh! Use the plug hole as the outlet for a filter/waterfall!!! One bathtub pond I saw (awful wanganui pet shop years back) had an old-style washhand basin mounted on the wall above the pond. The water was pumped up through the tap of the basin and overflowed down into the bath. If mounting is difficult, simply have the water coming out of the bath tap!

Lovely photos! Especially the second to last one Looks like a great place to spotlight - easy access, shallow, still water-surface. When netting in places like that put a net flat on the ground near the fish and use a pokie-stick to poke it into the net. The fish being... the kinda spotted thing in the center of the photo, not sitting on the substrate? I would say it is an evil troutlet! :lol: :evil: Upland, Cran's and common are indeed your only choices in bully species there. They are the only ones that do not (always) need sea-access, since that river is dammed. The tiny koura are SO CUTE Tis going to be neat seeing everyone's native fish hunt photos over summer

TO Auckland: To San Diego: sigh, I have speed envy now....

and at uni popularity doesn't exist and it is ok, nay it is normal, to be intelligent! :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: I can't wait to go back next year! Studying Ecology.

I wanted to use it, but a billion years ago when I last looked at it, it looked far too hard to do. i know i tried once, but gave up. I am sure it would get used in the new version if it was not so off-putting.

what do all the L's and numbers mean? And papers PLURAL? I finished school 11 years ago, and way back then I sat Bursary and was in seventh form.... (and marks actually *meant* something, and you only got one go at anything :roll: )

Thanks, I did find that while searching. Pretty much all that was on here. So how did you go with your leaves, Dixon? I am trying it at the moment with the mudfish, and they seem to love it. It has changed their behaviour somewhat. I am rather intrigued to know how it all works with the water chemistry. Technically they are decomposing, but how does it affect the water? Softening will only happen if there is little buffer there to start with (rain water etc), but my fish are fine in a range of pH and KH levels.

Just wanting to hear the experiences of others using leaf litter as a substrate. Just tell me what you did.... what sort of leaves? did they take long to disintegrate? Did you have to add more regularly? and especially: did you happen to take note of the ammonia/nitrite/nitrate and what happens as the leaves break down? Thanks

Lead is ok. They use lead strips to weight plants down. Copper is not. Opposite as for humans.

Usually it is a tannin thing. If the water has leaves or wood in it skeeters are much more likely to be found in it.

If there are no fish in the pond the skeeters are coming from, then there is very little chance of their being parasites. If there are fish in the pond there is very little chance of there being skeeters... Did this person KNOW the parasite came via the live food, or guessed? What sort of parasite was it?

SPINK! That must mean you got a JOB!!! Congratulations! :bounce:

They are neat eh? I tried some in my aquarium once, realising that they couldn't right themselves if upside down (no extendible foot) I put them all carefully foot-down on a rock. Half an hour later I discovered that the bullies had prised off and eaten every last one of them! (and you will have seen just how hard it is to get them off rocks!) I had a couple in a fishless tank but they died, not sure why. Looking forward to your photos. (before anyone asks what on earth they are, we have had several threads in the past discussing them, do a search )

Aristophanes (arist-off-a-knees) Greek playwright. I jsut always loved the name and wanted to call a cat that. It would suit their innate superiority

Intriguing! I followed where the pic came from, and it is of the marine pipi, so did a bit of hunting. DAMN it is hard to find proper details of freshwater bivalves!! I did find Cucumerunio websteri, which may be it. Do a google image search, there are a lot of photos of old collections. I would absolutely love to see some! Thanks (my Cran's bullies are spawning as we speak, I even saw the female upside down so she could lay her eggs on the 'ceiling' of the nest! I have a tiny peephole into the nest)

There is almost no hope of ever accidentally running across a native frog, certainly not when looking for exotic frogs. Natives have very little to do with water, they live in wet bush.

Adodge - I would still say that water quality was the big one. They can generally cope with slightly elevated temperatures (I am talking low 20s here) if the water quality is impeccable. But if the water quality is bad and the fish are already a bit stressed or lowered immune systems, then the temperature becomes a bigger issue. If you can't convince this guy that weekly 30-40% water changes are vital, then tell him not to bother as it will only fail yet again and kill more critters. What do you mean by 'cleaning the tanks out enough'? Sounds kinda drastic. Too much thorough cleaning can keep a tank on the brink of being uncycled just as too little cleaning can quickly turn it into a cesspit... Chillers are around $1000 each, depending on size. Try using a small desk fan aimed at the surface of the water and on 24/7. Can work well on tanks with a large surface area like that. Just remember to make some kind of escape-proof mesh lid to allow air in (and preferably another for out) Fishfreak: Good to hear that you are conscientious about returning those eels! Sadly most of the large eels I have seen in captivity have had that blue ring around the eyes (though it alone is not a definite indicator, I just don't know the head-shape well-enough). I was rather disappointed recently when spotlighting with some guys from... A Public Aquarium... got all excited about this enormous longfin we saw and they wanted to come back and get it for their already very-well-stocked eel display. How about leaving her where she is?

oh... ok... not sure why that would be.... maybe it is the people swimming in it... Try another stream? Hopefully someone from Auckland will pop up and name a site to try. When I was up there in January they just seemed to be everywhere.

I want a rechargeable lizard! :lol:

HaNs: pipis in Taupo?? what do they look like? There are freshwater clams/pea-mussels/fingernail-clams that are quite widespread. They are tiny (hence fingernail, but think woman's little finger nail) http://www.nzfreshwater.org/clam.html I have a couple in a container for a while, amazing how quickly they could whizz around by extending their foot and pulling the shell along. Would love to get some more for my freshwater crab tank. Preacher........... :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: There are far too many user names, real names and faces for me to keep track of without an involved searchable database! I do remember you now. Spoon: there are hundreds of species of freshwater mussel around the world, most (over 200) are in North America

There should be billions of shrimp up your way! At least there were when I was up there.... I guess it depends on the state of the streams you are looking in... but still. Ok, HOW are your looking for them? Grab a net, put it downstream of some vegetation (waterweed or grasses trailing in the water). Use your hand or foot or a stick to wriggle the vegetation, starting further upstream from the net and work your way towards it. Lift net and go at the hoard of shrimp! Alternatively put your net downstream of a rock and lift the rock. The current should flush everything into the net. These are also good ways of catching fish, koura etc. (The shrimp can be a little deceptive. They are see-through and some will jump about and others will lie still. They can look like bits of muck rather than shrimp... They are small, up to about 3.5cm usually.)

I think it is actually ok with exotics like that.... not sure though. (and it is Deoxyribonucleic...)