Stella

That does sound like fun! Chalk another one up to the 'jealous' list. Maybe you shall have to take up fossil hunting one day

Unfortunately (as far as I am aware) there is no way of telling sex of kokopu unless they are gravid. Not sure what a gravid kokopu looks like yet, but it doesn't really have any abdominal swelling.

I have a <20cm giant kokopu that is looking decidedly off colour and I am not sure what I am dealing with or what to do. Symptoms: Sitting near the surface, just holding position (not gasping or hanging, no buoyancy issues, no clamped fins) Pale Thickened mucus coating, most noticeable over the eyes Spot of blood in one eye, eyes possibly look a little swollen Had a strange white thing near its anus hanging from a mucus string (kinda like an opaque white small planaria, no distinguishing features but not typical poo) The anal area seems a bit swollen and like there is a poo sitting right there but not coming out. It has looked like this for at least 24 hours. It is not interested in food of the activities of the other fish. I netted it out easily (though it objected to being in the net) and looked at the anal area, definitely odd. I tried gently pressing towards it and whatever is sitting there wouldn't budge. A little bit of fluid came out but that was all. All the other fish are looking extremely healthy and I had the water tested last week and it is spot on. Currently doing a waterchange and getting the fish separated into a hospital tank. I am really worried. It is not looking doom and gloom but things are definitely Not Right

Thanks for the write-up, Pete! I had a great time too. Been so long since I have done that properly! I did get really really cold though (I feel the cold badly at all times) and unfortunately there was just too much current for it to be really good: The fish were hiding and very difficult to see. Highlights for me was the biggest common bully I have ever caught (about 13cm, not enormous, but big for me!) and picking up a cray without squealing like a girl and dropping it! Video of catching bullies is here: And the cray is here: (Please bear in mind I was tired and struggling to find the right words!) (There are a few other new videos up there too, but those are the ones from last night)

You must have had some good experience doing zebra stripes to begin with! How hard is it putting that stuff on? Have to be perfectly accurate the first time?

Hi Olly, You can borrow on of my spare tanks tonight if you wish I have a couple of two foot tanks sitting around empty.

OMG that is awesome! Please tell us how he did it

Well, the weather is looking spectacularly good! The Hunt is ON! :bounce: There is also a girl coming along who is studying mudfish at Massey for her masters (I am going mudfishing this weekend with her!) but she has never been spotlighing before and knows little about other native fish, so she seems to be really looking forward to it too. We *nearly* had the local area manager of DOC coming too! But sadly he had something else on. Might be along next time though, is keen and has some background in native fish. Ok, remember to bring: WARM clothing and a hat GUMBOOTS TORCH no matter how pitiful, to stop you tripping over in the dark at very least. I will bring a few nets but we won't be doing much catching so don't worry about bringing any yourself. See you tonight, my place, 7pm! :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

I got a pot of worms, supposedly non-tigerworms, but they were about 1/2 tiger worms which rapidly took over the culture and my fish objected. I also can not start a compost heap due to living in an apartment with shared grounds. I have a 20lt bucket under one of my fishtank tables. It is filled with leaf litter and has a whole lot of holes drilled in the bottom to let excess moisture drain into the kitty litter tray underneath it. THe worms are all hand picked, but I tell you it is really easy! Go out at night after it has rained and there will be huge worms all over the concrete. These are 'nightcrawlers' and they eat leaves. They are much slower to breed than the tiger worms, but much more tasty. If the worms are too big for your fish, take a container, lay a few worms stretched out in in and pop it in the freezer for 10 mins. You then have a lot of worm-sticks that chop up really easily.

Ah that is great news, thanks. I just discovered a different tank to the one I was thinking of using it in has gone nuts with BBA. Some new questions: 1 - Will it kill green algae? 2 - Will it kill higher, branched algae (charophytes, nitella) 3 - How do you work out the dosage? 4 - How much does a bottle cost? Thanks

No, not human waste on farms. People DO use it on their vegie gardens (post treatment plant) with roaring success, but you are not allowed to use it on farms.

Cool, so Olly, Museeumchick and PeteS are keen There is also someone else, not on this forum, who hasn't got back to me yet. Supasi, don't worry, another time will come up, or you could just set a date to visit. 6th Sept could be interesting as there is a Forest and Bird trip to Lake Papaitonga (near Levin) looking for glowworms, but I will add in spotlighitng for banded kokopu also will be checking out Himitangi Beach on the way back as there is a good spot for giant bullies. And of course whatever other spots take our fancy!

good point I don't know...

Hey guys, the weather forecast is looking hopeful for this saturday! http://www.metservice.com/default/index ... ston_north Chances are the streams will still be a bit high, but will check during the day. I propose the same plan as last time: meet at my place at 7pm, then go the Bledisloe Park by Massey followed by Kahuterawa. Olly, Supasi and Museeumchick, I still have your phone numbers just reply if you are keen, but if anyone else is keen to come please PM me with your details and I will let you know my address. I will be off mudfishing that day, but I expect I should be back by then.

Yesterday I went of a field trip with one of Mike Joy's Massey environmental studies classes. One of the stops was the Fielding Sewage Treatment Plant.... It was quite an amazing place, and not as smelly as I expected... Though disturbing they they still really can't treat stuff properly and still don't have any environmentally sound thing to do with the solid matter. (we have been sh**ing for how long and there is still no solution?!) Anyway, at the end of the tour we came around a corner and there was a huge aviary! Rather incongruous. Then right next to it was a small plastic goldfish pond. Some of the girls were talking to a guy who worked there and found out the story behind this. There is this machine right at the start of the plant that filters out all the solids (undisolved toilet paper, poos, misc, quite disturbing to watch). This is a slow machine, a little like a waterwheel with strainers instead of buckets. Apparently one day someone saw a barely alive goldfish being strained out! (This was a seriously right-place-right-time moment. It was picked out and nursed back to health! This was three years ago. The fish is now huge and healthy. I am guessing 10-12cm long, good body shape, glorious fins and bright orange. I don't know the type but it is a fancy one - really good head-growth, flowing fins, dorsal fin. They bought it a couple of standard double-tailed goldfish for friends. Even so, don't flush your pets, kids!

David was kind enough to give a guided tour for my friends and I of his live exhibits at the Museum last summer when I was in Auckland. Really good stuff! Make some time to go visit

Aw shucks guys :oops: That sort of thing is actually exactly the sort of work I am wanting to get into! I really enjoy the education side of things and obviously the aquariums thing is slap bang in the middle of my field. Ideal that we are in the same area! A few preliminary thoughts on what I could do for this: Preliminary ideas/advice of courseProvide aquarium-adusted fish, so they will hopefully be visible and not get sick I could thoroughly seed a filter for the display on my tanks dramatically reducing cycling issuesAll the setup, maintenance etc expertise you could want Photos for static displays (see my sig below)Maintenance and practical stuff while the display is on Um.... anything else? We should make a time when you can come over and see my tanks and we can talk about your ideas :bounce:

Sounds chaotic....! At least it is working. Remember these meds are actually TOXIC to the fish at the right level, and this is a long-term treatment so they are exposed for a long time... If you can get the sick ones out of that tank and into a hospital tank. The spots do NOT die when they fall off. They fall to the ground, mature and release thousands of baby whitespots who go looking for a host. It is ONLY at the free-swimming point that they can be killed, not any other time. That is why it is CRUCIAL that you keep treating for one week after all the spots are gone off the fish (it is a much slower cycle in cold water). (Not sure how much of this you know, but the cycle is often misunderstood which leads to re-infections, especially for coldwater fish) By filter media, if you mean carbon it will be taking the meds out of the water. Always take carbon out when using meds.

Snorkel, I assume you know to pause it and let it completely download before you watch it? Pete is putting together a couple of videos I shot today in the field of Mike Joy and Amber McEwan electrofishing We also took a few videos of my fish last night. Hopefully to be uploaded soon

If inanga do not have the appropriate cues to breed (which means access to estauries etc etc) they can live for a long time. HOWEVER they can also become eggbound and die... So in an artifical environment, like and aquarium or pond, they may die or they may keep going. I had an inanga that lived for three years in captivity (longer if you count the whitebait stage) and I have seen a 15cm monster inanga who was five years old!

ok so you know I didn't mean to put the youtube one there again :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: www.mudfish.org.nz

They would have originally had a fairly wide distribution across Canterbury, but now are really really threatened almost PURELY due to habitat loss: wetland drainage. Mudfish around the country are often confined to tiny pockets of habitat, often areas that were just too hard to drain. If you think about how a tiny aquarium is much less stable (water quality) than a great big one, you get the idea of how marginal these habitats are for them. This is a short basic intro site to muddies: http://www.youtube.com/user/nznativefish (PeteS has also got mudfish, some juvenile black mudfish from Waikato)

Hiya Spoon! Yeah, native fish rock though I am biased. Colour? They were all brown! You wait till I upload a redfin bully one tonight The mudfish do look very prehistoric. Funnily enough they are actually fairly 'new'. They are evolving from a more 'fish-like' fish to being like an eel, so they are actually a transitional fish undergoing big changes (in evolutionary time). My ones are brown mudfish, Neochanna apoda. The Canterbury one is Neochanna burrowsius (names after Mr Burrows, not a burrowing habit). They all look pretty similar though. Biggest difference is the Canterbury one has small pelvic fins, the brown mudfish is slightly further along the evolutionary scale and has none at all.

I have had two different bullies spawn when there was no male in the tank. Unfertilised eggs would go cloudy at around 24hours. Some fish can do it, some can't. Inanga are known to die or explode (seriously) from being eggbound.

so what is so wrong with my photos if tiny grainy jumpy videos look better? ;-P I am pleased to announce that my 'channel' is number 83 on 'the most viewed today' chart of NZ channels...!