ninjafroglet

You can pretty much assume it's a male, I'm not sure how to tell the difference but they pretty much all are.

Those sound more like grass carp, they're obviously not native but have been introduced to control water weeds to lessen the use of sprays. They don't breed in our waterways so they have to be farmed and introduced. When we were bowfishing in the waikato we were told to not go after those ones :-?

Hehe I think it was a reference to an actual school not fish schooling, twas a pun. Anywho, after that little bully has been in my tank now, I want more of them .

Cool fish

probably about 3 weeks, they were fairly tame from the get go though =o. I have seen mine with huge stomachs, but I'm not sure about wanting to see one with worms coming out of its gills

They seem to be fairly OK with the flake and wafery things I give them atm. other then that I've been feeding skeeters, frozen bloodworms and white worms, and hopefully when Ryan's daphnia cultures up and running they might be able to have a few of them I think the main problem so far is that they just weren't hungry, I'm off to try now though because they haven't been fed all day.

I've tried using various different types of food, mainly flake. Theres some frozen shrimp in the freezer that I'll try though. I think my inanga like to steal the food I give to my koura aswell, They won't be interested in any of the food I put in for them but as soon as theres a pea floating down they won't give up on it :lol: Thanks for the help

Is there any trick to this? or is it just something that takes time? At the moment they seem fairly comfortable with my hand in the tank but they won't eat directly from my fingers or tweezers. They've swam up, grabbed a bite then darted away a couple of times but most of the time they just ignore me.

Wow was just surfing through the biotype aquariums, some of them are really cool.

I wish amano shrimp were available in NZ

Ahaha so true =p

Although I haven't eaten them myself I've heard they taste like mud. Apparently people take them home alive and put them in big drums of fresh clean water. After a few weeks in there it filters out the muddy taste and then they eat them. They do make good burley though because they are a very oily fish.

Heh, some guy sold the spider on ebay later for 10k, but the buyer isn't paying up =D

WCMM are coldwater, and pretty tough.

On the bright side the loaches will be happy =D

It just does....besides, we're special

great idea in my book.

You have to remember that they aren't really *free*. You are removing them from their environment, which harms that population of shrimp, in turn reducing the food for the things that eat the shrimp and so on and so forth. While it's not as much of a big deal with shrimp as they are fairly prolific, I would still be careful about taking large numbers at once. Of course I am assuming you are taking them from a wild population?

How big are the babies? As far as I know the eggs are held underneath the mothers tail until they hatch, and then as small koura they cling onto the underside on their mothers tails until they are big enough to fend for themselves.

I had similar experiences with my first load of shrimp. They are generally pretty hardy things, their only weakness is (as mentioned) Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates, aswell as chlorine from tap water. They also need alot of oxygen. When its due to oxygen, the bigs ones go first, as they have higher oxygen demands then the little uns. This is what i think killed all the big ones I got out of the river near us (Its a pity cause one was definatly 5cm, maybe 6 ). This could be why your bigs ones are karking it. However, I'm not sure about the smaller ones. It could be the decaying old ones, but I'm not to sure, it was the small ones that always lived for me. Re Romeo Mine may have been sourced from a Koura farm too, next time in Animates I will check where they get them from. It could be that because they have less competition in captivity for food, they don't develop the same aggressive tendencies towards other species =o. Some time I'm gunna try and get me some more shrimp, I don't want to take too many at one time, I mean taking them in the first place is bad enough, so I'm trying to space it out a bit.

The NZ native ones get to about 5cm, I have two 3cm ones in with my koura and they seem to do fine. However my koura is store brought so it tends to be a bit more placid then the others ones I've heard described.

I wouldn't, sounds abit small

We bought 4, 3 were male and 1 was a female .The dominant one killed on of the other males and bullied the other to death. Now we have a pair that are about 10cm (or more including the tail extensions on the male). Its a pity though because the male doesn't seem to want to mate . I would definitely do something about the other 2 before the dominant male gets big enough to start doing some damage.

Sounds like an awesome cat

Hahaha, might be a bit more crunchy tho