David R

Yeah I was happy to have caught that, luckily it was just a well timed yawn.

It was only a matter of time, the cute little P. palmas at HFF were irresistible after visiting Fruju and Henward and their bichir collections.... I'm on the look out for a few more similar sized dels, and a couple of normal (not albino) senegals if anyone sees any for sale...

I guess by "pets" you mean non-fishy ones? Here's Sacha, our 14 month old Hungarian Vizsla and Toby, our two year old Beagle X Fox Terrier.

HFF Albany had some lovely looking dwarf flags this morning....

In the next house when I know I'm not going to be moving for the next 20+ years...

Meh, if you're happy with it then its all good. Larger altifrons have never been too difficult to move IME if you decide they're making too much of a mess later on.

I have 1800x750x600 in 10mm, provided you have a good level stand it should be fine. I'd probably go for a 12mm base if you're going to pile it full of rocks though.

Thanks all. Thomas, with the amount of food I chuck in there is plenty to go around. With 10 geos, 9 plecs, a pictus and 6 hungry uaru that have no objection to eating off the substrate I can chuck in massive quantities of food and not have to worry about it going uneaten and spoiling the water. There are three 2kg buckets under the tank, one is crumble and one is flake! Fishybuisness, the tank is 2400mm long, 977 wide and 620 high. It was fairly cheap because Greg had a piece of tinted 12mm glass that was the perfect size for the base, thus the strange dimensions. I had asked for 900 wide originally but then asked how wide the glass he had was and decided it wasn't worth trimming 77mm off it. Al, after getting a good close up look at the barbs on the rays in Richards tank in the UK, and at how rough and textured they are, I decided against the underpants method. P44, I think the uaru would accept that challenge....

despite finding its way into the sump twice since I've been back...

Alright its not quite as watching a big armartus chase down a feeder, but I thought I'd take some pics of feeding time in my 370g South American tank. I feed a mix of flake, crumble and sinking pellets for the cichlids and plecs (as well as floating pellets for the aro). Most of the fish are mid to bottom feeders so I place a short length of PVC pipe in the gap between the lids and load all the food in there so it can slowly sink out rather than floating and spreading out over the surface. It didn't take long for the uaru to figure it out, they now immediately associate the pipe with food and will get up inside it to try pull it out. Not sure how they'll get on in a few months once they get too big to fit in there!

Put the sponge filter in your community tank for a week or two.

Unless they've just come out of a concentration camp any fish should be fine for a week or so without food.

Perhaps give it a water change using as much water from an established tank as possible? A tank doesn't just "cycle". The regardless of how much media you have, the bacterial colony will only grow to the size supported by the amount of waste you have. So for example if you 'cycle' the tank with ten goldfish then dump in a huge arowana and a bunch of other big fish you'll have problems as the bacteria colony won't be large enough to deal with the amount of waste the new fish are producing.

Ah, yeah its nice to have another species of Parachromis on there, not holding my breath to see them though!

That thing about the one "living" in Auckland thats getting pissed off about the plans for the underground rail loop made the papers overseas, in England they called it a "mythical swamp monster"... :sml1:

new species of jag?? :-?

So what do you have to do to make them look like that!!??!?! If they always looked like that I might be tempted...

Add that to the list of awesome fish we can't have for any reason other than no one has done the work to add them to the list. Certainly no more risk [in biosecurity terms] than any of the large CA's on there now, but just not as common in the hobby 15 years ago as they are now...

They all have different personalities! Maybe you need a couple of big bichirs to pick up the shrimp he misses, I had the opposite problem, I couldn't get the green or dats to leave any sunken prawn for my ornate!!

and just as predatory [if not more so] than the hoplos... Josh they look like a Heros of some sort, not sure which one.

I'm not convinced about the diet thing (although it may help), I did keep a silver for a short while and despite eating nothing but pellets and prawn it started to develop it. Interesting observation about the sinking mealworms, but its hard to tell if he's not seeing them or just ignoring them. My green would spot pieces of shrimp on the bottom of the tank and scoop them up, and so does my black, so they certainly see downwards when they want to.

Thats what I thought too, they can be a bit territorial but not too bad, your tank has plenty of footprint for them. Keyholes could also be interesting. If we got true H. severus I'd suggest them, but not the muddy green things we get here. How about some royal whiptails? Maybe chuck in 20 neons too and see how they go with the geos.

They were pretty cool, amazingly coloured, but because of the hugh humidity and mist in their enclosures I couldn't get good photos of the others. Does anyone want to see some of the other non fish/reptile pics? Here's a few from the BMW Museum in Munich for the car enthusiasts among us. Well worth a visit for anyone interested in cars or motorsport, and even just for someone interested in architecture, the design of the building and the way the cars and bikes are displayed is very cool. BMW Welt [World] where you can go to order and collect your new BMW. My favourite part, the touring cars. E30 M3, probably my favourite shape/model 3.0 CSL One of the many engines on display, some even had headphones so you could listen to them being raced. The BMW Art Cars are all on display in a round part of the building that spirals upwards before coming to the top level with a big high dome roof and 360* screen playing a film about the project. Could have spent hours here!

Thanks, managed to snap a few nice scenic ones in Berchtesgaden and on the cruise, hopefully some of them will be worth printing in a larger size. Here's a few more pics from the aquarium, yes they did have some african cichlids! Reptiles on the second floor (often hard to photograph thru wet or scratched or grubby glass) Amphibions and Insects on the third floor Weaver Ants

I find it a big deal, even though the fish seem to live normal lives with it, it would just continually irk me which is why I wouldn't keep one. Koji on MFK has posted several pics of his comm tanks with a bunch of good sized silvers all with no DE, but he ignores anyone who asks how! I've often wondered if its not to do with having bright lights above the tank and constantly looking down and not up when hunting.