whetu

Still alive, still growing, and still to small and transparent to make out much detail. It looks like it has a single, dark horizontal stripe (like a SAE) but to be honest I could just be looking at its spine through its transparent body. Another possibility has ocurred to me. The arrival of the fry coincided with me getting some Red Pine plants from Animates in Mt Eden. I just chucked the plants in my tank without quarantining or cleaning them first (I know, not recommended...) but anyway that has left me wondering if an egg or a fry might have hitch-hiked its way into my tank. That would be even more exciting - a bit like getting a lucky dip! :bounce:

I would start off with the minimum number of fish possible, and work your way up from there. Not just for the reason of cycling the tank, but also so you get a feel for doing regular maintenance and get everything in balance before you start planning what to do next. Exciting innit?! :bounce:

Dosing with Flourish (a fertiliser) will be fine. Dosing with Flourish Excel (a source of bio-available carbon) is not necessary as the CO2 will do that job.

Oh that's so sad to hear! You're really not having much luck at the moment. Sorry I can't help as I don't ahve fighters - I can only offer my best wishes for your little guy, and condolences if he really has died.

It's about 1cm long at the moment, and very skinny. By that I mean it has a fat tummy but the body itself is long and narrow, which is one of the reasons I think it might be a SAE.

Good decision, Gee Tee. A tank with lots of different tetras can look quite bitsy, but a tank with lots of one type can be spectacular! I just put a new light on my tank that has some blue in it, and my cardinals look amazing under it.

Your birds get gingernuts for their lunch? I want to come and live at your place. I only get boring sandwiches.

Wow what a story! Do keep an eye on him for any injuries that might get infected - but yeah, sounds like one very tough customer!

Yes, I wish it would hurry and grow up so i can see what it is! Still alive and well as of this morning.

There are some videos on Youtube of catfish in people's swimming pools in the southern states of the USA. Apparently they put them in there to clean them for part of the year - in some places they can just catch them in their local ponds and bring them home. I don't know how they would catch them again when they want to get rid of them though. I have enough trouble catching my fish in my itty-bitty tank let alone a swimming pool! As for chlorine etc, by the time a pool has been abandoned for a few weeks and started to get really slimey the chlorine would have been exposed to enough air and sunshine that it would be all gone. I have also heard that people who are abandoning their houses are leaving fish tanks in there too. One guy I was talking to rescued a bichir from a house that had been abandoned several weeks before. Without power the tank was all nasty and mucky, and the poor little fish was living in only a few inches of water! People must be really desperate to just leave everything like that and walk away.

Or you could take your tank along and plug it in to the local hospital or civil emergency HQ! :lol: They have generators that turn on automatically in case of power failure. Obviously if you're on life support in a hospital you would want a fairly reliable power supply! I'm sure the hospital won't mind you turning up there with your tanks and plugging them in for a while.

Still alive as of this morning! I fed red flakes to the rest of the fish and noticed My Pretty's transparent tummy was soon full of red, so it's at least big enough to eat smaller bits of flake. Things are looking good for its survival! Also in the flake feeding frenzy one of the gold barbs came close to the fry, and it zipped away like a little torpedo. :bounce:

I dunno... it's survived this long on its own... I think I'm more likely to do harm than good if I intervene now! If it was in its own little space I would have to feed it, do water changes, etc etc. Where it is now it just eats whatever it can find and has a whole big tank to swim around in! I do actually have one of those breeding nets that hangs on the side of the tank, but I don't think I will use it. My Pretty seems to be doing just fine by its tough little self.

Oh! I missed the cardinal tetras! Realistically though, I would expect Cardinal Tetras' fry to be tiny, even if the eggs didn't get fungussed and stuff - although I suppose that's still more likely than Clown Loaches! :lol:

Last night while feeding my fish, I noticed one single free-swimming fry up near the top of the water! :bounce: The thing is, I really don't know what kind of fish he/she is, so I hope s/he lives long enough for me to find out. [see my sig for a list of tank occupants.] This Unidentified Frying Object is about 1 cm long (an easy mouthful for any of my fish! ). It is pretty much transparent - all you can see is a head and if you look very closely you can make out a long, clear body with no discernable markings. It is swimming in that jerky motion used by little fry, and is always hanging about in the same part of the tank - near the top, at the back, in wide open view of all its potential predator tank-mates! Brave little fellow! I have bred gold barbs before, and from memory by the time they were this size they already had more colour and a more distinctive fishy shape than this little guy. I'm sure it's already too big to be a cherry barb. The two bristlenoses are male so unless they have adopted, it's not one of theirs. That leaves the CLOWN LOACHES :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: or the SAEs. Unfortunately I think the SAEs are the most likely parents. :lol: I'm going to leave the brave little fry to fend for itself. I considered setting up another tank for it, but I reckon since it's come this far on its own I might just leave it and hope for the best. Any tips or hints for me and my UFO? Any clues to tell me if it is indeed an SAE? (Unfortunately it's far too little and too far away for me to get a photo.) Thanks for letting me share my exciting news! :lol:

While I agree that probably most of the good bacteria died during the transfer, I'm not so sure that they die off as quickly as rumoured. After a recent water change, I accidentally left one of my filters turned off :oops: (I have two eheim cannisters on my tank). I discovered my mistake about 48 hours later, so turned it back on and monitored the water conditions in the tank. If the filter had gone anaerobic and all the good bacteria had died, I would have expected at least a small ammonia spike, but didn't get one. I think in tukituki's case it was probably a combination of some of the bacteria in the filter dying off and the gunk stirred up from underneath the UGF that created a nasty soup! The addition of the new fish at that stage would have added to the load. That's my theory anyway!

I stayed with a woman in the USA (near Washington DC) who had a pond in the corner of her living room. It was just a child's paddling pool with an airline running into it. However there are several differences between our situation in NZ and people in the US and other places overseas. For a start, a lot of them run humidifiers in their houses to try to keep their humidity up, because their houses are so dry! Here in our maritime climate we tend to have the opposite problem, so you might find humidity was an issue with an indoor pond. Also, they tend to keep their whole house warm in winter, usually with some kind of underfloor heating. The woamn I stayed with had gold barbs in her pond, without a heater. The whole house was maintained at a temperature somewhere in the low 20s all year round, with central heating in winter and air conditioning in summer. In NZ we have much wider seasonal variations in temperature inside our houses and the floor especially would get very cold in winter. The only indoor ponds I have seen in New Zealand tend to be in a conservatory or entrance area with hard surfaces that won't be badly affected by humidity and/or water splashes. And as far as I can recall, I have only seen goldfish in indoor ponds.

It could be a good thing that your nitrite levels are higher, if your ammonia levels are lower. It could mean that your tank has advanced further through the cycle. The next step will be increased nitrate and further reduction to ammonia and nitrite. It is very hard to predict how long it will take for the tank to complete the cycling process as it depends on a lot of variables. All you can do is minimise the stress on the fish while the cycle is continuing at its own rate. It sounds to me like you have done the right thing by removing the under gravel filter (if it's not working). An eheim canister is a good filter and most of your beneficial bacteria are in there. Am I right in thinking that Stress Zyme is a product containing beneficial bacteria, designed to help the cycle process? If so I would follow the instructions on the bottle and use it to help the cycle. Some people say that kind of product really works. Other say it's not much use. But if you have it, then I say definitely use it! Good luck with your fish and good on you for finding out what the problem is and addressing it. I'm sure it will get better from now on.

I must admit I haven't read all the posts in this thread, because I read the first few posts (including one insulting Sue Bradford for the way she looks) and found myself getting quite annoyed that, yet again, an important debate like this can be brought down to that level. However, I would like to make the following points (and I hope I am not repeating too much of what has already been said here): 1) Section 59 of the Crimes Act allowed adults to use "reasonable force" as a defence when they were charged in court with assaulting children. 2) Sue Bradford's bill repealed section 59, removing this defence. The media branded it an anti-smacking bill for their own reasons of stirring up conflict. 3) This law change has been strongly supported by organisations such as Plunket and Barnardos whose job it is to care for and protect vulnerable children. It also received support across the political spectrum. 4) The referendum question was an extremely poorly drafted document to the extent that the referendum result is not in any way relevant to the true issue. A more accurate question would have been "Should an adult be permitted to use a defence of 'reasonable force' when charged with assault against a child?" I do not believe that it is any more necessary, desirable or acceptible for an adult to hit a child than it is for a husband to hit his wife, an employer to hit an employee or care-givers to hit sick or elderly people. Personally, I had one parent who believed that hitting me was a good way of teaching me 'manners' and 'respect'. As a result I have grown up with no respect for that person. Hitting someone who is much smaller than you in order to control their behaviour is the mark of a bully, not a 'good parent'. Fortunately I also had one parent who gained my respect by behaving in a calm, loving and rational manner. That person retains my love, respect and admiration and has proved to be a wonderful role model for my siblings, neither of whom find it necessary to hit their children in order to manage their behaviour.

[lecture] By the way, did your mother dirty all the dishes herself? Do the rest of you eat off paper plates? :roll: [/lecture]

Buddles Wishy-Washy Paleface I used to have a blue & white budge called Moonshine

Sudsie Soapie Dishie Sunlight Palmolive Squeek Detergent Am I close?

I have tried that but I inevitably spill water on it (even just the condensation dripping out from under the lids when I remove them) and the backing ends up all streaky. But maybe that's just me! If you sealed the top edge with tape you might have more luck than I did...

Hmmm... that may have been me if it was aaaages ago... I do use cooking oil to stick my backgrounds on. Just a clear, flavourless oil (like sunflower or canola) brushed onto the plastic backing, then press it against the glass and push the bubbles out using a ruler or a credit card or similar. It works well for a really dark black background. When you peel it off (years later in my case) the oil will have gone sticky but any residue is easily removed using solvent.

Yep. Try experimenting for yourself with a black rubbish bag and see what you think. But don't try using the black rubbish bag as your permanent background! I tried that and it all stretched out of shape and ended up wrinkly. Then from the front the wrinkles looked like cracks in the glass. Not a relaxing sight! :lol: