David R

Exactly it would make more sense [financially] for myself or my partner to take unpaid time off work to do the jobs, rather than pay someone more than I make an hour to do it.In fact I could afford take two hours off to do a job they would charge an hour for if you look at my pay after tax!

Same here, unless I've already just done a water change because then the problem is likely to have come from the tap water... 6.0 is fine for your fish, so long as you haven't just dropped them in there from pH7.0+ water...

Checking all the water parameters is about the first thing you should do when fish don't look right. If thats all good I'd try some different food, maybe just needs a bit of a change (don't get him hooked though!). My biggest did this a while ago, I just figured he didn't like that particular bag of shrimp so gave him the odd piece of beef heart to keep him going until I started the next bag, and sure enough he started eating again.

It may just be that he won't take the pellets. Some fish wont no matter what you try, others will. The bigger of my two dats won't touch pellets, even spits them out if I put them inside a shrimp, but the smaller one grew up on them.

IIRC the colour of the pelvic and anal fins have more to do with it. There was something on mfk a while ago about some clowns from a different locality that have pure red/orange fins, not black like almost every clown you see, they were from a different river system. I think there was three different varieties?

I can't see how it wouldn't be ok, but I think there's more to it than the colour. Try starving them for a week or so. You could also try stuffing what ever you feed them now with pellets.

Dunno, they use hormones to trigger it, but its still a genetic lottery like "normal" breeding, so I don't see why it would. Its not like they're cloning them! :-?

I'm still amazed at the poor spelling I see on forums, do people not know Firefox has a spell checker? And I'm guessing its not the only browser that has one....

Yeah its strange that with the huge number of young produced every year more colour morphs haven't popped up. I've seen all sorts of variants on the stripes but never anything like albino, leucistic, platinum etc...

Unless you build the stand to support it well above the tank its going to make cleaning the 2' difficult (unless it can easily removed). Other than that it will work, but the question I would ask is why? It seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a small tank, you could pick up a second similar sized tank pretty cheap if you browse trademe and just build a two level stand, rather than having a big plastic bin sitting on top of your tank. There is nothing wrong with the concept though, I know someone who added two old recycling bins full of bioballs in a similar fashion above his 3000L+ tank for extra filtration.

As above, the online stores don't sell fish so can afford to put less of a markup on their hardware. Unless you want a canister to filter an empty tank I'd suggest supporting the LFS even if it costs a little more. Try having a talk and see if they can sharpen the price a little?

Perhaps we need a sticky post with a link to the list of allowable imports........ http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/imports/ ... ic.all.htm

You could keep kribs or lumpheads with them, they are both african cichlids. What kind of loaches do you have?

True, I thought you may have been thinking of the ornate pim which is a different species of the same genus. The varieties you mention are simply different local populations, not even valid subspecies.

Nope only Pimelodus pictus

Hah, another friend refers to himself as a SITCOM - single income two children oppressive mortgage... Oh yeah, nice fish P44!!

He's a SINK.... Single Income No Kids. (you're not married are you P44?!) I got called a DINK by a guy at work (double income no kids), took me a minute to figure out what he was on about...

Can I help? No. But I thought I'd post anyway since you made me look at this thread (for the second time I might add) by using a vague title.

I'm having some troubles with the pump (an expensive Laguna 7500 which is only flowing ~1500Lph with almost no head, instead of the 7500Lph max its supposed to! Hollywood are sorting it) so I'm getting a lot of crud building up on the bottom as there isn't much of a current in the tank. I've added a 700Lph canister and removed the substrate, that combined with big water changes is keeping the water clean. The muck you can see in the video is about 3 days worth! I think a lot of it is scraped off the wood by the pleco.

What a waste of our money. Should have just hit him with a hefty fine and prohibited him from ever coming back here.

The alpha male has coloured up nicely with no substrate in there, I had a mix of dark grey grit and brightwater gravel before and he was a lot darker. If I put anything back in there it will be builders sand which is a lot lighter.

Looks good, what are the dimensions? It looks tall.

Took the substrate out as I'm having problems with the filtration. Aro and dats are still for sale if anyone is interested.... 8)

LOL brave man! Duncan and I will take some of the dels off your hands if the worse case scenario happens...

So they are on the floorboards not directly above the joists, like this? leg _________||__________ floor ...||...................|| ..joist.................joist Looking at it as a cross-section through your floor. If so do you know how thick your floorboards are? It might look solid now, but there's a couple of long-term problems I'd be worried about. The main one being uneven sag over time, putting uneven pressure on the legs and the bottom of the tank. I doubt the floor will collapse and you'll come home to find your tank in the basement, but if you've got six feet putting over 100kg of pressure on pieces of timber less than 2" thick then I'm certain there will be sag/flex of some degree. I don't know if it will be enough to unevenly distribute the pressure enough to crack the tank, but I wouldn't want to take the risk myself. Not trying to rain on your parade.....