David R

Good work! Nice to see one of the recent imports being bred and established here.

There was a great article about a blackwater biotope in PFK magazine a while back. It was only a 2' tank, but it was set up with twisty driftwood, sand substrate, a few small plants and leaf litter on the floor, they had a school of cardinals, and maybe a few ottos and it looked great!

Need the dimensions really, if its a 3' cube there are countless options, but if its 3x1x1' you'll be limited...

There are all sorts of things that can kill fish that aren't obvious to us. My big fire eel dropped dead one day, couldn't find anything wrong with it (didn't dissect it though).

You're going to have to do some serious reinforcement of the floor!! I wouldn't want to fill it much higher than about 650mm with the 12mm glass. How is the stand designed? Does it have a flat bottom, or will the weight be on "feet"?

If there were guidelines that say staff shouldn't pat dogs without asking the owners permission first and she didn't follow them, how is it managements fault? Even if there weren't set guidelines, I would have thought it would have been common sense, especially for someone working in a pet shop, to ask before getting up close and personal with a strange dog. The dog was behaving fine until she put herself in the dangerous situation of having her face inches away from the dogs. What ever happened to personal responsibility?

So was it 100x50 or 101.6x50.8? :lol:

You can't actually buy either here, only 100x50 rough sawn or 90x45 gauged...

But how much of it is really animates fault? Morcs were those guidelines in place before this incident?

Good stuff, I hope the staff adhere to it, and if they don't I'll be reminding them that they should! Rotties are beautiful dogs, one of dads friends had one when I was a kid and I always used to play with it, and there was never any aggression. How ever, any dog [even those little designer handbag mutts] can react unpredictably when a strange person comes up and starts getting in their face....

Yeah I'm not likely to take out dogs there again. We had Sacha our Viszla pup in at the vets at Botany at about 10 weeks old because she had a cold and was sneezing out copious amounts of sticky green snot [lovely!] and after seeing the vet we decided to duck into the store to see if there was any dog food on special. One of the girls working there comes up to us (I was holding her) and starts rubbing her head and face and putting her face right up next to hers doing the "aww you so cute ga ga ga" kinda thing. God only knows how many other dogs she'd handled that day, or how many she touched after that, but working in an environment like that and putting your hands all over a puppy who is obviously not old enough to be fully vaccinated doesn't seem like a good idea to me! The first thing people should know about dogs is that you don't touch them with out the owners permission, and working in a pet store certainly doesn't make you exempt from that! Hopefully Animates have learned their lesson after today and will be reminding their staff of this, Morcs/P44/Luke I'll be interested to hear what the company does as a reaction to this...

I've had siporax for about twice that long, eventually it becomes thinner and brittle, and the rings can easily be crushed with fingers. I threw a heap of it out because I didn't want it crumbling away in my sump. Hate to think of where those tiny fine glass particles are ending up! I guess it depends how much you need, the Eheim stuff may well be the best but no way was I going to buy 25kg of it for my sump!!

They can get to 20cm, but its almost unheard of in captivity. Real slow growing, even compared to a datnoid. Would end up as a snack for the aro.

Glass will break down over time, supposedly has more surface area, until the fine pores clog...

I like to think that there is more to nutrition than the few statistics on the back of the packet and feeding a varied diet will have benefits.

Its a mecca for fish geeks, well worth the visit if you're up here.

So why not take it that one step further and say anyone who breaks the law gets the death penalty? I think you're over-simplifying it on many levels. Where do you draw the line with speeding? Do you allow a small tolerance for the inaccuracy of peoples speedometers? What about someone in a rush to get their pregnant wife to the hospital before she gives birth? And how many "speed related deaths" happen below the speed limit where people aren't driving to the conditions? The open road limit might be 100kmh, but isn't someone taking a 50kmh corner at 90 in the wet and crashing a speed related accident? Anyway, this is way off topic, and bordering on political and therefore against the rules, so I'll shut up. However I still maintain that it is a sham that someone who brings in a couple of nearly harmless reptiles is sent to jail while drink drivers who kill people are given home detention and community service.

No, it would either let serious dealers off lightly or put half the population in jail. Carrying a bit of pot for personal use is nowhere near as serious an offence as having a large quantity of class A drugs, why on earth would you want to treat both offences the same? What else would you apply this flawed logic to, speeding tickets? Someone going 5kmh over the limit is fined the same as someone going 50kmh over the limit? All thats going to do is make people think "oh well if I'm going to get a ticket I might as well go as fast as I can"....

Thats ridiculous, and simply isn't how our justice system works. Should someone with a 50 bag of pot be charged the same as someone with half a kg of heroin? They're both drugs....

Got a call this afternoon saying they have spotted metynnis (Metynnis maculatus) in stock. I haven't mentioned it to them for a long time now, but they still remembered I wanted some. Thats three species I've been after for ages in the past 12 months (festae, black aro, and these) cheers guys!! There are more in both stores (and probably other shops), neat little fish, have the "piranha look" like the common silver dollars but don't get as large and also have attractive faint spotting on their sides. Go get some!

Sounds good Fraser, but you'll have to watch the festae digging with the plants! Mine are digging holes all over the place.

As Broms said, the chances of them surviving and establishing a population are so slim its not even funny, there are other things to consider than temperature. The only real risk is disease, and I can appreciate that it could be a serious threat to our native reptiles. However I can think of two cases recently where innocent people have been killed by drunk drivers who avoided jail time. I bet if they were anything but snakes he wouldn't have gone inside...

Maybe HFF could start teaching people grammar and punctuation... :lol: Good to see the fish went for a fair price.

No but a drunk driver could kill off your entire family, and I think we all know which one is more likely. It still seems remarkably unjust considering the things other criminals can get away with before being locked up, my ex-bosses camper van was broken into by a kid of similar age with a huge string of convictions for similar burglary and stolen goods offences, and all he got was a few hours community service and had to pay reparation (which he has paid less than 1/4 of over 3 years)....

The differernce is that its highly unlikely tropical reptiles would even survive let alone breed here. Eggs need a constant 20-25C while burried in the ground, how likely is that to happen here? IMO its a disgrace that in the eyes of the law an offence like this is treated far more seriously than more common crimes like drink driving, tagging, even burglary. I'd love to see drink drivers do 3 months in the big house for a first offence... :evil: