spoon

well if the tank is divided is it going to be the same body of water in each compartment? if it were different bodies id do blackwater in one and plants in another then just spray paint the tubes black at the blackwater end to reduce the amount of light getting to it

trace elements are all sorts of elements in tiny amounts selenium , boron hell even chlorine can be trace elements

clown loaches i have to say too they go great with africans just acclimatise them slowly i even had a skunk loach in with my africans for a while but he proved too aggressive and too much of a fin nipper so he went to a mates tank 8) he has settled down now apparently

ive had kuhlis end up swimming in the bottom of my cf 1200 even using the strainer , they were nice fat buggers too i dont know how they got through the strainer and logic tells me they cant have swum the wrong way up the lily outflow and thru the impellor because they were perfectly ok

yep you can get shrimp here in chch filter can be what ever you have handy even an under gravel will work (if its just for shrimp)

is the tank braced though? the calc is very good but dosent take into account bracing

test kit is the only way you never know your tap water may already be good enough

how did you measure the ph of the grit

the bigger the algae scrubber the more efficent it is at nutrient export so its worthwhile making it a decent size some of the reefers use par 38 energy saving bulbs they are 23w and have a built in reflector

chuck some ox heart in the water and use a large net . i would only go for small ones for a pond they are mean escape artists as bdspider said you would want some kind of over hanging ledge on the lip of the pond to avoid escape

males arent too bad until they have a female to compete over and there is no point just keeping females as they are normally very dull as for size well it just depends on how many you have and i guess footprint of the tank like a 90l that was not very deep but a large bottom would be better that a tall tank with a small bottom

i just feed a tropical flake to my goldfish (have some moors also) it floats they go nuts over it

riverine means from a river in this case rather than a lake the majority of african cichlids come from 3 lakes malawi, tanganika and victoria. malawi cichlids are by far the most common . you can keep cichlids from other lakes with them but you have to still be careful of size and aggression differences. rivereine cichlids i can think of are lumpheads and red jewels and kribs and can be kept with less aggressive lake cichlids (though people will tell you about aggressive jewels, kribs and lumpheads ) perhaps an option for you is to have a male only tank with a few yellows and some peacocks but the size of your tank limits numbers some what

make sure its calibrated properly there is a secondary adjustment on jagers

can sometimes be a show of aggression as well i take it its a male fish going up to another fish and doing the shake? i have a melanochromis that does this to any new fish i put in the tank

slaters apparenty they breed easy as

thats awesome im interested in the rock work is it like a fabric that you strecth over the formers?

i reckon metal halide is a good option you will get good depth penetration with MH then you can put your light loving plants directly under them

riccia will either die or grow like a weed its just one of those things perhaps try duckweed for a floating plant or if you want a moss that will grow out of the water java moss does i have some on a piece of driftwood that has grown out of the water and half way up the wood there was a link to a site about making a java moss wall by growing it up open core foam as found in filters but i cant find the link

i dont see why not many people have and still do use UG filters they work well i have evem seen a fishroom at a LFS that had small corner filters with only gravel in them so it must be a decent form of biological filtration

i found stick on ones to be really inaccurate i use digital now they are pretty cheap on TM

yea um youre not likely to hear it on the radio

i will when you try nile, cradle of filth, satyricon and dimmu borgir etc

heres a song by a crazy band called dog fashion disco it sounds very much like johnny cash but be warned the rest of the songs by this band are nothing like this desert grave by dog fashion disco http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrsfI7T3R4s