darkfur

my mum's cat could probably "acquire" some for you... wouldn't come complete with tails though..... :-?

you can check the lime content by dropping a little white vinegar on the rocks. If they fizz (it might just be a few lacklustre bubbles) they contain lime and will raise your pH sooner or later. When I take rocks from the river I like to bring them to the boil in a pot just to kill off any flagellates, leeches, nasties that could be hiding. Oh and dog poo germs. The other option is to rinse them in a potassium permanganate solution, I'm sure you can find lots of info on that by googling it. But that's more useful for things that you can't boil up.

they sound a bit narky... often you can spot the males by looking at the dorsal fin, the males have a few extended rays at the front

ty, i think I got lucky with the photo but it was just using a digital SLR on a macro setting and then cropping all the boring stuff out. Will get on to raising that salinity. These are good little fellows, someone has trained them to take flake and other non-live food. I just chucked in some biosuppliers community frozen tucker and the whole tank went mental. I particularly like watching them suck up the tubifex like spaghetti!

not ready for any right now, just curious! you're doing a great job with them. When the time comes I will know who to hit up......

thanks! I spotted him at the petone lfs and had to have him. A few nice ones left there for you but he was the only pure white. Will definitely save you some bubbas when they arrive (swap ya some of those guppies!)

how are the babies going? and where do you get your live food from? do you culture it yourself? I had seahorses many years ago but when I went away my housesitter couldn't manage them and killed them. Would love to do it again, especially these days now decent marine equipment is available

yup! actually I have a post in one of the other parts of the forum, asking if anyone had the 'recipe' in tsp per litre. I have mollies in there too as I understand they are comfy in brackish too. They were all purchased from people/lfs's keeping them in fresh water so I guess I would have to ramp up the salinity slowly

now *that* is a molly. Paul if you have any white ones even approaching that PM me!

I thought I would post this pic of one of my new bbgs - he has a face like a grumpy little ol man. Looks a bit nipped on closer inspection but I imagine he will do better with me than at the lfs

Hi all I have set up a new tank with mollies and bbgs, they were all bought from people and lfs's that had them in fresh water but I understand they prefer brackish. Actually years ago I had white lyretail mollies and if I only knew then how rare they were I would have somehow kept them through my flatting years. I kept them at brackish but I can't remember how many tsp of salt per litre of water... anyone help pls? I thought I would ramp up the salinity nice and slow, any suggestions on the rate to do this at would be appreciated. Oh and does anyone know much about the genetics of colour and fin morphology for mollies? Want to breed the lyretails into them and keep them sparkly white if poss! PS thanks tracytrout for the females, I found a really sexy white sailfin male for them too! pps here is my new boy admiring himself - unfortunately chose to hang out in the least photogenic part of the tank

you can always culture your own fruitflies, I raise mine on banana (its actually the yeast on the grotty banana they eat)

many years ago i had a turtle with similar problems to this one and the main reason was vit D deficiency. She wouldn't eat because they don't eat what they can't see, and there was no vet with expertise so I raided the university library for a cure. Cod liver oil enemas. It was not fun for me or her but it did save her although she always floated higher on one side due to liver damage. I was thinking if he is constipated cod liver oil enemas may help, but then again turtle care has advanced considerably since the 1990s. best of luck!

one of my female platys has clamped her fins down, her back is arched and she's looking thin. Just over the last 3 days and the others are all fine. Is she diseased or is this just age and having obscene amounts of fry? (not sure how old she is btw, I have had her 6 months myself)

that's them, frisky little chaps that they are!

I would be interested too, the ones in the LFSs look miserable

ps sharn do you know anywhere i can get more info on the conchus? I can't find info on the net? or a latin name would be a good start

my fish did seem to be breathing a bit heavier, but it was mostly listlessness I noticed. I have seem some for sale in LFS that had bright red gills - IMHO probably really bad sign but they were there for months and didn't seem to get worse. If anything mine were looking better and better until the last few days before their deaths, they had gotten noticeably brighter colours. The conchus didn't seem to be having a go at them specifically, they were just being psycho and zooming around and sometimes collided or got within the rams personal space. I can't think that it was 'just one of those things' with the 2 of them dying at the same time

Can anyone help me work out what killed my two young gold balloon rams? I got them in March and they had been doing well in my community tank, or so I thought, they had gotten brighter in colour, grown and developed more irridescence. Also they were more tame, came up to look at me through the glass. Also in the tank: a pair of gold gouramis just now approaching breeding size, 2 neon tetras, a zebra danio, 6 guppies and 6 platies, 4 baby GBAs. The tank chemistry was always good during this period, no detectable nitrate or nitrite most of the time. A couple of weeks ago I added some new plants (dwarf sag.) and some new fish, 6 x conchu blue tetras. By my calcs the tank was not overloaded by adding these fish, there was a tiny blip of nitrite and nitrate but never to dangerous levels on day 3 and 4 after they were added but it went away again. Soon after this the two rams started acting mopy, they were spending most of their time in the lower depths of the tank. They appeared to not like the conchus very much but who can tell what a fish is thinking? Over a period of a few days one stopped eating entirely, hid in some rocks in the back bottom of the tank and then went belly-up. The other one lasted a couple of days longer and spent less time in hiding but went the same way. My question is what caused their deaths: some of the sag had lead ties on them which I did not remove, could this have poisoned the rams? or were the conchus too boisterous? they are quite active, but much smaller than the rams were. BTW I can't find any info on conchus on the internet. I was checking the rams for any external signs of disease and there was nothing to see even with a good post-mortem looking over. I also did daily checks of the water quality, the nitrites by my relatively insensitive dipstick test were always less than 2, and the nitrates less than 20. The rams have been happy in worse conditions than that. Can anyone identify the killer?

I'm really suspicious that anything you buy from Spotlight or similar will have been fumigated when it was imported... I used to work for Spotlight and when you have spent all day handling cartons of brand new sheets etc your hands come out smelling pretty chemically

pose I mean. He's a great frog but not computer literate

I have a little wee set up for my whistly and I keep mountain minnows in the bottom of it - they clean up any fruitflies my little guy misses. I grow a little plant you often see sold in small pots at the red shed or at garden centres as baby's tears or Helixine solandri (think i got that right!), and a miniature african violet which likes the humidity, and a whoooooole lotta spagnum moss. There are some large rocks in there, one of which is a fake rock which has a crevice in it for planting. I got a very very tiny pump from a seller on tm, which was designed to make tabletop fountains, and made a little waterfall that trickles over the moss and rocks. There's a space in the middle with a bogwood bridge that the minnows like swimming under, dark pebbles holding everything in place. I will post a photo if frog will post when he wakes up tomorrow. He's temperamental. He seems quite happy in there, it's not much but it's his. I think the sphagnum is probably doing wonders for the water quality.

the guy to ask, would be Dr Ben Bell at Victoria University, because he keeps them there and is kind of a frog guru. They are super super rare though, I imagine the red tape is pretty thick

I find I can make new cultures of fruitflies from my biosuppliers cultures, if I feed the culture a piece of banana every so often. You just make it small enough to go in the container, it liquidises pretty quick on its own! My frog is a whistling treefrog so he is quite happy on these little flies, if its a bell frog of one sort of the other it would probably want bigger game