Charles

Oh, I am a little bit guilty now that some of you good folks have explained the reality of your situations. At the moment I am running 15 aquariums, 2 tropicals, one with 2 goldfish who won't go away (daughter won them years ago at the fair) and the rest kokopu, mostly giant kokopu. there are also 6 ponds totalling 2 acres with a hundred thousand or so common whitebait and several hundred grey mullet. and then there is the spring which runs into two more ponds where I have 4 raceways with a thousand or so banded kokopu plus 4 more giants. Plus there are two streams running through the place that I have fenced off and have been replanting with native trees. They hold whitebait and eels etc and even the native freshwater limpet, which believe it or not, is bioluminescent. There is also the water lily pond and another for eels. Our 60 acres borders an river estuary and I fish for flounder, mullet and kahawai from a dinghy plus whitebait in season of course. Fish are still such amazing creatures. So perhaps you could say I am mildly obsessed (my wife uses stronger terms). Just because I am still using the steel frame tank I made in the 4th form at metalwork (I'm now over 50) plus still got the one I bought in 1961 from Johny Walkers pet shop in Queen Street (anyone remember that shop ?) for two pounds five shillings of hoarded pocket money doesn't mean that everyone else is like that. Never heard of chillers, what part of NZ do you people live in where the T never goes below 22 C anyway ? These native fish live from North Cape to Bluff and I guess I got keeping them as a kid because I couldn't afford Heaters etc. They also came at the right price although it has been a long hard road of learning about disease control in wild caught fish. I have kept natives in tropical tanks. They are a bit boisterous for your average neon tetra but some of your cichlids would get along OK with them. Once had a tank with torrentfish (which live in places like the Haast River) living with siamese fighting fish which I was into breeding at the time. Some natives can get pretty revved up in tropical tanks and eat like mad. but over summer, even my big ponds can get up to 28 with no problems with the natives. So maybe I'll just grumble along quietly in the background slowly infecting you all with the bug for native fish. My first tank was an old school one that I kept two freshwater mussels in for years. Not your most active pets but quietly interesting all the same. This hobby started at 8 !!! I may need help.... Charles

Dear me, You spend 30 years studying fish, you got a few degrees and spenT 18 years as a fisheries scientist and the past 10 as a fisheries consultant. You work out how to keep native freshwater fish alive and breed them in bulk. And then you realise what a waste of time and money it all was. I posted banded kokopu for sale, a category C endangered native fish found nowhere else in the world. Aquarium keepers in New Zealand have a very bad track record for conservation. We are responsible for koi carp in the wild and a releasing a staggering array of noxious aquatic plants that cost the country millions of dollars a year to control. I thought that keeping native fish could be a way of moving past this fixation on exotics to stuff that is really rare worldwide, ie our native fish. we can supply captive reared specimens that are disease free and trained to eat artificial foods, so that it is a lot easier to keep them then the hard learning curves that I have had. But nah. interest evaporated instantly when I asked for $10 for mediums and $15 for large. Then I read postings about tropical marine setups that consume 2 Kw of power and cost $6000 to set up. Even relatively cheap tropical marines come by poisoning reefs and aquarists resist paying the real cost of producing healthy captive bred fish. No relativity here. I see a toplit NZ rainforest tank with elegant black tree roots and water golden with tannins. The bottom is river shingle with some beach shell, because this is a pool in lowland puriri forest, by the coast. Dark green liverworts grow over the stones and dozens of elegant freshwater shrimps pick their way through the drifts of characean algae that form a bright green backdrop in the open areas. And by the logs drift a couple of 150 mm banded kokopu, like miniature pike, waiting for a bug to be dropped in. This scenario only happens in a few streams now, only on a couple of minute islands in the middle of nowhere. But it is not exotic enough for us. So it seems to have been another great idea gone phut in Rodger Douglas land. Charles the total lack of interets