Yellow

Hi alanmin4304, are those the actual grindal worms (shorter than white worms)? Interesting!

Price (Pick-up CBD, around the university): $5 if you bring your own container/bag, $7 if not, in exact change. Price (postage-included price, overnight courier only): $18.50 for one small bottle, $20 for two small bottles. They'll actually survive a week in regular non-courier post most of the time but overnight courier is worth the peace of mind and doesn't make much difference in the long run. I would prefer pick-up as postage takes about half an hour of my finite lifetime that I'd rather spend drinking tea and fencing and being a responsible, productive citizen, or earning minimum wage. Quantity: A minimum of two dozen mature females if picking up, a maximum of a dozen per bottle if posting. They will run out of oxygen if posted in a sealed container at high density. At a dozen per bottle and overnight courier I have always had survivors, and would be willing to refund if you can show me a photo with twelve dead daphnia on arrival. All you need is one live female to guarantee yourself a colony, as population usually triples every week under good growth conditions. Start with a dozen, and after 8 weeks you'll have more than 70,000 if you aren't limited for space, light, or nutrients. What they are and what they are good for: Daphnia carinata are a common freshwater zooplankton in New Zealand that you can easily culture for most small-to-medium-sized fish. They eat suspended microorganisms such as algae, and because of that are quite nutritionally-balanced (algae produce stuff like Omega-3's that fish can't synthesise on their own). They usually reproduce asexually (are all female) and usually give birth to live young, but under adverse conditions will tend to produce males who then reproduce with the females to produce dormant resting eggs. Mine haven't done so in years. The mature females are about 4.5 mm, which is still large enough for the average goldfish and small enough for mature Betta splendens and neon tetras, but may be too big for smaller minnows to fit in their mouths. Newborns may be too large for most newborn fish fry except guppies to eat. If you have microworms though, you can feed fry from newly-hatched up to a size that can eat D. carinata. A combination of sieve and fine-meshed net usually can separate out different sizes of Daphnia. You can find them in many rural stock troughs and lakes. If it's about 4 mm long and looks like a typical daphnia, it is probably D. carinata. If the adults are smaller (0.5 mm? about the size of newly hatched brine shrimp), it's probably Ceriodaphnia. I have some Ceriodaphnia but none to spare yet - Ceriodaphnia are a very adequate BBS substitute due to their size (although microworms are a more convenient BBS substitute). How to grow them: They do fine outdoors anywhere in New Zealand, in full sun or semi-shade in a reasonable-sized open container such as a 10 L bucket. Indoors is a different story. I do not recommend indoor culture unless you have daphnia to spare to try it out. Preparation: leave water from aquarium water-change (assuming normal pH) or rain water out in the sun for a while (maybe a week), with a small layer of clean dirt (about 2 mm, say) for nutrients and stability. They can also be cultured with blackworms if you use this layer of dirt. Obviously, use dirt which sinks, not potting mix. Maintenance: do small (5-10%), regular water-changes when you harvest, to be safe. It's fairly easy to just scoop up culture water and pour through a net, and then replace that same amount of water plus a bit more to account for evaporation. I get away with no water changes in my back-up cultures, somehow, but I do not recommend this. I've kept a back-up culture going for years on my balcony in a sealed peanut-butter jar but that jar is a lucky jar. I do not recommend this for a regular culture container - just get a bucket or old fish tank as if the container is too small it will be more at risk of crashing. Back-up cultures are very important.

Hello there, I have Daphnia carinata, a small number of Ceriodaphnia pulchella (?), some microworms. I think my whiteworms died. I would be willing to swap some Daphnia carinata and/or microworms for your whiteworms (when you get some). I could also sell, but why sell when I can trade! There are some small, flat, circular snails, and slightly bigger snails in my tank but I have no idea what they are. They don't seem to be eating my plants and seem to just graze on surface things. Feel free to PM me if you are interested to sort out a time and location. I'm located in the central city near the university, and am not free most weekday nights or Wednesday afternoons, and weekends are about 50-50.

Has anyone tried breeding a pair of anabantoids (specifically, paradise fish, but should be generalisable) where the female is a bit larger than the male? I was thinking that this would prevent the female from being dangerously harassed by the male, but it looks like it's gone to the other extreme and the male spends most of his time hiding. Perhaps there's a threshold size at which everything works out. I've tried breeding WCMMs where the female was about the size of a female guppy and male was barely mature (but mature enough), which didn't work, oddly enough.

According to what I've read and tried, the whiteworm/grindal worm genus can handle being underwater for quite a long time, as well as live without food. If you try covering the media with water for a couple of days, that should kill off most of the mites. It worked for my whiteworm culture. P.S. if you have them spare, I'd be keen on some grindals! I can post a self-addressed stamped postage bag along with small amounts of any of the following: blackworms, daphnia carinata, a. barteri var. nana 'petite', peacock (?) moss, twisted val, sunset hygro, riccia, if you don't already have them (I notice the 'Plant Specialist' title). P.P.S. by any chance have you heard of a. barteri var. nana 'petite' being able to hybridise with any of the other sorts of anubias we have in NZ?

So, ah... did he survive quarantine?

This may be a bit late, but... The Warehouse has half-price Sistema 'Klip' lunchbox-type containers at the moment. Depending on the size of your current whiteworm culture container you should be able to fit one in a 2L or 3L box. At $4 (after the half-price) the 3L ones would be my choice since they hold a fair amount of air in them, which gets refreshed each time you open the box to feed the worms. Another aside here (I just have to ask): I used to have a grindal worm culture about 5 years back, but lost it and the person who it came from lost theirs as well. Does anyone have spare grinal worms they can post me?

Wow. Whenever I think I've seen them all, a surprisingly new and good-looking guppy photo is posted by JaSa.

Small fish are nice in that they can move to anywhere with enough space for a small desk. No need for room for paper and books on a desk now that a computer is enough, more room for tanks. Having a fishtank near a computer could be risky though.

"Tests of the euryhalinity of G. huttoni showed that the species has high salt tolerance and can easily and actively live in undiluted sea water without prior acclimitisation by placement in diluted sea water." - McDowall (1965). Studies on the Biology of the Red-finned Bully Gobiomorphus huttoni (Ogilby) II.__BREEDING AND LIFE HISTORY. Transations of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Zoology, Volume 5. :lol:

I'd be keen on any info as well on finding equivalent-sized LED units. I've got a non-working Juwel Twin-Lite PL5-20W which just clips under the hood, and would be keen on finding a similar LED unit which can use the same clips. (My tank's a Juwel Korall 60 - 54 L tank, about 60 cm by 30 by 30)

For the sporadic courier user, these anecdotes give a fair indication in an open environment and aid customers in rewarding good prices and service with future patronage. It should be noted that special orders or those in bulk may be better accommodated by some couriers than others. On a theoretical detour with my limited economics knowledge: Having unlisted rates does prevent competitors from getting quotes to undercut, and allows more flexibility in pricing, aiding finer market segmentation (charging different consumers different prices based on what each consumer can afford instead of a single market price). Having listed rates signals confidence to take on a potential competitor's price challenge. Which will be best, who knows, but generally more information increases overall resource allocation efficiency if it doesn't severely enable anticompetitive behaviour.

How are they now?

I've only seen clear ones, when they mysteriously jumped on me while I was fishing. I'm curious to see photos of these coloured ones.

Once or twice I've gone spotlighting in the Turitea Stream (Manawatu). It was easy to get to - within cycling distance even. Inland locations far from a beach at least have that going for them. Does anyone know of any small streams in the Auckland region which are within walking or cycling distance of a train station?