whetu

Aaaawww sorry to hear about that

I also worked in retail for many years, with about 5 years as a retail manager. There are lots of different ways of making sure you get the right person for the job, and once you have them, making sure they stay motivated and continue to get better as time goes on. Barrie, your point about people not being honest during the interview process is a good one. I have been involved in a lot of interviews over the years, both as employee and employer. The most effective interviews are often the ones that appear to be an unstructured conversation but are actually designed to learn a lot about a person, their knowledge and their attitude. For example there is no point in a job interview asking someone if they are passionate about [whatever the product is]. Of course they will say "yes" because they want the job. If I were interviewing staff for a job in a pet store, I would walk around the shop with the interviewee and observe them with the animals, other staff and potential customers. I would chat to them and ask them what's their favourite fish [for example] and why is it their favourite? Would that fish be suitable in every tank? If not, why not? How about this puppy? If someone came in the store to buy that puppy, what questions would you ask them first? etc etc. They don't have to know all the answers, but they will reveal a lot about their interests, their attitude and their abilities during that process. I think problems with mismatched staff are 50/50 the responsibility of the staff member and the employer. The last job I applied for, the manager spent his whole time telling me what a wonderful company it is, and his great plans for the future. Then he gave me the job because I nodded and smiled at the right times and he liked me, but he knew absolutely nothing about my ability to do the job. He is currently involved in several legal disputes with other former staff as a direct result of his lack of proper recruitment, selection (and dismissal) procedures.

I haven't heard of a bloated clown loach! Poor little guy. When other fish get dropsy they can get that 'pinecone' look where they puff up and all their scales stick out. With the clown loach not having big scales like other fish maybe it has a systemic infection like dropsy, but the symptoms aren't the same? A photo might be helpful. Peas certainly won't do any harm. I would also suggest making sure he's getting plenty of oxygen and excellent water quality, and keeping him in very low light to minimise his stress while you try to work out the problem. Good luck!

What kind of algae problem do you have, wellmax? Different algae of course have different causes and different solutions. I have found that the answer to all my algae problems was to add a small school of Siamese Algae Eaters and to stop feeding my fish kiwifruit! :lol: [Yes I am serious... It was an experiment that didn't go very well...]

Hi there and welcome! When you say you change the water every 5 - 6 days, how much of the water do you change and how do you change it? Most people tend to change between 20% and 50% of their water, once a week (although there are plenty of variations on that). Depending on your water supply, there might be something in the tap water that could start off an algea or bacterial bloom, or you might be stirring up something from the bottom of your tank that causes a bloom to start. The more info you can give us about the tank, the more likely someone is to be able to pick out the likely cause of the problem, so here are some more questions for you: What size is your tank? (I know you have said it's at least 40 gals but I'm not clear if you're talking UK or US gallons, also it might be useful to know how wide it is in relation to its height) Where do you live? (You can add this to your profile by going to the User Control Panel at the top of the page) Do you use any water treatment products when you add new water? What kind of filter do you have? What else is in the tank apart from fish? Do you have gravel in the bottom? Any decorations like shells or ornaments? Well I think that's enough questions for now! I'm sure we will be able to help you when we know more about your setup.

They must have had them at the Mt Eden Animates recently because that's where my little fellow hitch-hiked in from! :lol:

Yes, it is a surprise to me to find he's a rainbowfish. I assume Animates Mt Eden must have some, because that's where I got the plants and that's where his parents must live! My partner's reaction was that we need to get him a whole bunch of friends and have a school of them in the tank. (This is the kind of reaction I like from him :lol: ) but unfortunately he's not prepared to get a bigger tank. We really don't have room for a school of rainbows in addition to everybody else already resident in our 4-footer. Any tips & hints on how I can bring up this little fishy to be a healthy and well-adjusted young adult before passing him on? Anyone want to sponsor him for $1 a day? (I will send you photos and letters from him!)

Aaawww my dear old grandma began to misplace her marbles after my grandad died. I went to live with her and she would turn off any lights that I turned on. She would sneak up the dark passageway, reach into my room and switch off the light when I was studying! Nothing I could say would persuade her that I needed the light on! One night I was having a shower and I knew she would come and turn the light off while I was in there, so I jammed a chair up against the bathroom door (the lock had been removed as she had locked herself in there once). I heard her try to open the door, but smirked to myself because I knew she couldn't get in. A few minutes later the light went off! She had gone to the fuse box and used a knife to pull all the fuses out one by one! :lol: Needless to say, I installed a padlock on the fuse box after that, and very soon Granny had to go and live in a place where they could look after her better than I could. Oh how I loved my dear old Grandma!

I think you're right, twinkles! I have a baby furcatus rainbowfish! :bounce: I googled how to look after him and I hope I can do a good job of bringing him up. It seems that he needs a high-protein diet with things like baby brine shrimp. I don't have any of those, so he will just have to grow up eating flakes and anything else left over from the other greedy gobbly fish. twinkles, I will let you know how he progresses and whether he grows into a nice strong healthy specimen. He's too little to ship at the moment but I will reasses when he's a bit bigger. I understand rainbowfish need to live in schools so I suppose it wouldn't be in his best interests for me to keep him in my tank as the only one of his kind. He might grow up to be a sociopath or something. :-?

Congrats twinkles! You sound like you're talking to all the right people and making good progress! Well done!

oooh that's exciting! :bounce: I ahve no idea about rainbowfish so I will google him. Thanks for the ID everyone!

Every time I do a water change and tank-tidy I run my fingers through the java ferns and tear the babies away from the mummy plants! Then I throw them out in the compost! :lol: They really do make the plants look untidy. If anyone wants all the babies they can handle and is willing to pick them up, you can have them!

I was just reading in another thread where someone used an algae removal product and lost a tank full of fish! This seems like an important issue as these products are available over the counter in a lot of places, and pet shop staff seem pretty keen to offer them as a first line of action for a tank that has an algae problem. Here's my experience with AlgaeFix. Manufacturer: Aquarium Pharmaceuticals Inc Active ingredient: 45g/L poly (oxyethylene (dimethyliminio) ethylene dichloride) :-? [Or something like that] I got a free bottle of AlgaeFix with something else I bought (can't remember what... the bottle has an expiry date of 2007 so it must have been a while ago...) Anyway I got green water and decided to try this stuff out. It had two results: 1) The water was clear within minutes 2) The fish were suffering! As soon as I put it in I noticed all the fish went and hid away under plants and in dark corners of the tank. The only ones I could catch a glimse of were the gold barbs who were under the plants 'flashing' against the gravel - a sign that there is something irritating their gills (the fish equivalent of coughing). Needless to say I did a quick water change. The water stayed clear after that, even though it had been cloudy for days before, so you could say the remedy worked. On the other hand it seemed to be a pretty drastic remedy and the fish seemed pretty unhappy with it. My advice would be to try every kind of non-chemical intervention you can, before you try this product. If you do decide to use AlgaeFix or another algae-removal product, do it at a time when you know you will be right there in the room and able to keep an eye on your tank. Be ready to do a big water change at the first sign of problems. What algae removal products have you tried and what happened?

I was just going to post here about my experience with the product called 'AlgaeFix' but I have decided to start a different topic to discuss it, as I think it is an important subject to draw people's attention to...

Here is my best attempt at a photo. Little rascal won't sit still and smile. :roll: Here's the same photo with a dotted outline so you can see the fin & tail shape.

Yes, still alive! Nobody has eaten it yet, so I assume they aren't going to! It definitely doesn't look like anything else in my tank so I think it's a hitch-hiker who came in with the plants. I tried to take some photos but it's so little that the camera kept focussing on the plants and I couldn't get any pics of it. I think Sam might be right that it's probably a guppy fry. If so, I'll wait until it gets a bit bigger then offer it free to a good home. Even though it turns out not to be a baby of any of my fish, it's still quite exciting to have a little mystery in my tank. Especially since my fish ate all the plants it hitch-hiked on so this fry is the only thing I have to show for my efforts. :lol:

Generally a few days either side of a water change will make no difference - but I think there might be some information missing from your post! Are you saying the water in your tank has turned green? Because this would generally indicate an imbalance of nutrient and light in the tank and will not be affected by a one-day-late water change. Please elaborate on the problem!

Excellent how-to photos there Caryl! We should all post pics of our spawning mops!

Go the bristlenoses! In a tank that size you would only need one, and since they seem to live happily on their own that will be fine. They do a great job of eating many types of algae and in my tank they seem to never sleep! They spend all their time cleaning the rocks and glass. Gristlenose?

:lol: Twinkles, I won't ask you how you know this! Mine are various colours (dark brown, black, dark green) fake fur-style! By this I mean each strand has lots of other fluffy strands coming off it. I really like the way it looks in my tank, to the extent that I wrapped some of my filter hoses in the green stuff to disguise them! Make sure the 'wool' is 100% polyester. I have had my mops for years and I boil them to sterilise them with no ill effects.

If you want to have more plants, just chop the tops off and re-plant them in the substrate and they will grow. But, like Phoenix said, if the light is blocked to the lower parts of the plants they will tend to lose their leaves and go all brown and yukky looking at the bottom, despite being green and bushy on top. Also your plants are absorbing nutrients (like nitrate) out of the water as they grow. It is good to trim them and remove them from the tank because you are removing nitrate at the same time and that helps to keep your water nice. If you leave them in there and they start to go brown and deteriorate, they are re-releasing the chemicals into the water instead of keeping them tied up in the plant.

That pollen is everywhere at the moment! I'm sooooo glad I don't get hay fever!

Ah yes - note my subtle use of language. You have their assurances from many years of use in aquaria, but not their recommendation for many years of use. One of my filters has also been running its Eheim media for about four years. I bought the other filter second hand and I suspect it is much older (possibly 10 years or more). After sterilising the media in that one, I am still using it, too. Unfortunately some of the media has become worn, broken, or lost down the plughole :roll: which is why I recently transferred all the original Eheim media into one filter and filled the other one up with the cheap Trademe stuff. I see no reason to ever throw away perfectly good filter media! Just rinse it or (if it gets in a really nasty state) boil it to sterilise, then keep using it forever!

Yes, he brought them in from Asia very cheap. I went and picked them up from the TM seller myself and saw his fish tanks that he uses them in, so I know at least he trusts them enough to use in his own system! He scooped them out of a huge sack and into the plastic bags that he uses when he sends them off to buyers. In my tank they do seem to be inert. They have not raised the pH, and did not fizz when I poured vinegar on one to test. I agree that if you want to be absolutely certain about what you're getting, you should buy a branded item from a fish store that comes with all the assurances and guarantees from many years of aquarium use. On the other hand I got these very cheaply and they seem to be working just fine for me!

Hmmm... interesting subject. My two cannister filters integrate several different functions, and for that reason I am happy to have them there. Here is what they do: Keep the water circulating in the tank, so it has consistent temperature and chemical concentrations throughout Create surface agitation, so helping gas exchange (O2 for CO2) Offer a well-aerated home for good greeblies (biological filtration) Gather a lot of the gunk together to make it easy to remove from the system in one go (mechanical filtration) Help make the water look clear (mechanical filtration) Increase the total water volume of the tank (although each filter holds only about 7 litres of water so 14 litres extra capacity isn't particularly significant) I suppose the least important of those are the two mechanical filtration functions - gathering all the gunk in one place and making the water look clear. Good circulation is the key to the rest, and could be just as easily achieved with a powerhead in the tank. I recently cleaned out one of my filters after it had been running for 15 months. There was a fair bit of gunk in the bottom, but not so much that it blocked up the system or reduced flow through the filter. If it had a pre-filter to stop leaves going in there, it would have been even better. I probably could have left it uncleaned for much longer without any ill effects (and will do so next time). So yes, in summary I agree with the assessment that the mechanical filtration is the least important part of the system and you could probably do away with it altogether without disadvantaging your fish.