Ira

Arowanas CAN live for ages, arowanas usually don't because people don't take care of them properly.

Give thema month or so and if you have a handful of females you'll have 800.

Solution: get cichlids. They don't get swim bladder problems from eating from the surface. Their bodies aren't so mutilated by selective breeding that they can't deal with a few bubbles along with their food. :lol:

I'm not totally confident about the DSB thing. But given that the nitrates seem to go up after a gravel vac...I'm assuming that it works about the same as in a marine tank where in a dep sand bed the anaerobic bacteria eat nitrates and give off nitrate gas and since I've seen bubbles when I vacuum my cichlid tank. Seems that the same thing happens in freshwater in a deep bed of fine gravel. I have a couple geophagus anyway which seem to keep the gravel pretty clean, I don't really get any debris when vacuuming the gravel anyway. If you DO get a lot of gunk out when you vacuum it I think you're probably better off vacuuming it out.

That's cool. He should be all set once the extra filters have had a bit of time to collect some bacteria. I've mostly stopped gravel vac'ing my cichlid tank because it seems my nitrates go up when I do. I think I've got a bit of a DSB effect going on in it. I test it for a couple weeks in a row without vaccing and it has practically 0 nitrates. Gravel vac and the next week it has 60+PPM nitrates.

Hehe, You probably got him at the Pet House in Pram, only one in Wellington so not such a hard one to guess. Did you see the box fish he had? I was SO tempted... I got his last yellow tang.

Remember, Suphew, he'll be using AUCKLAND tap water. That'd wipe out everything in the sponge.

Oops, The first one I bought(That died) was $120, the one I bought last weekend was $140.

The bacteria lives everywhere. I wouldn't bother with an undergravel filter, just have them rinse the sponge in tank water instead of tapwater.

A pinch or two would probably be enough for a pretty good sized tank. Just buy it from animates or wherever, it's pretty cheap.

$85 US, $120ish NZ. That's the price here in Wellington anyway, probably a lot cheaper in Auckland and Christchurch...

You could also simply push a bigpinch of food under the tank's surface before letting it go...

Caper, Just to give you an idea... Yellow tang at a fish store in the US(Probably not much less than in canada): $20ish US. Yellow tang at a fish store in NZ: $85 US Ocellaris clown at fish store in the US: $10US Ocellaris clown at fish store in NZ: $45US RO/DI filter in the US: $80 US off Ebay RO/DI filter in NZ: $350US Hmmm, Says he's getting rid of it because he has a baby and has to make sacrifices...He should sacrifice the baby, they're more expensive and environmentally damaging than marine tanks. And there are a billion too many of them anyway.

Yeah, you could do that if you enjoy doing things the hard way... Or just buy a bottle of snail rid(or similar snail killer) from the fish store for a couple bucks, squirt in and be done. It's a copper (Sulfate?) solution, does a great job of killing snails.

I think there was a clown in the tank at the time too. Not 100% sure, though.

I've had plecos and bristleschnozzes in tanks that I've dosed with about 1 heaping tablespoon of salt per 5-10 liters and they didn't seem to have a problem with it.

Define predator. Most fish are predators. Just some are predatory to smaller food like copepods instead of big food like other fish. You could try something like a trigger if you have a tank big enough for it...

Only some african cichlids like high PH, south american, central american and a lot of other african cichilds other than the malawi and tanganyikan cichlids DON'T like the high PH. So, basically all the good cichlids don't like the high PH. :lol:

Yeah, FW snail rid should be pretty effective at killing the snails. It will also wipe out any other invertebrate and poison your liverock. All it is is a solution of copper.

OMG, I can't believe someone actually bought those fake corals...

Here you go, these should work until I decide to delete them because I need the space.

WCMM are about $4 each.

Yup, they're more like $3.50-4 each here. So, no, $2 each isn't expensive.

I don't think mudskippers or land hermits are available in NZ.

I dunno, I think it would kinda ruin the show if they were found...