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well, not having a clue what i was doing i picked her up out of the water and gently persuaded her to open her mouth - i saw a tongue and thats about it... she is getting used to me picking her up because i'm tending her wound a couple of times a day, so i'm not worried about picking her up often what is it that i am looking for? i imagined i'd fine some kind of jelly of eggs on the inside of her cheeks... Progress report: she is swimming around more now and has her colour back - there is still a huge red patch on her side which i'm treating three times a day with Chris Brand Miracle Fluid (home-made MelaFix). water changes once a day of about 20%, with a light dosing (about 1/4 recommended) of methylene blue to help keep the fungal levels in the water down and a heavy dose of aquaplus in an attempt to help calm her. unfortunately she is still not eating and i really hope that will not be her downfall. i don't suppose you can force liquid food down their throats?

in my mumble opinion, i would suggest not breeding them. if you have managed to get conditions right so they won't breed, you have done something more impressive than getting them to spawn! i have a tank with about 150 of the 'lil buggers in it and i have had no luck getting rid of any of them - this is the peril of breeding convicts.

they eat lettuce?

hmm... i didn't think of that... actually i wouldn't have thought of that! are there any other ways to tell if she is holding aside from looking thin?

I recently got a pair of hornets and one of them beat the other up in transit. The beaten one, the female, lost a fair few scales and developed a fungal infection which is healing rather nicely now and she is getting her colour back, but I can't get her to eat anything and she is starting to look quite thin. She won't take flake or bloodworm, or bits of meat; raw, cooked or rancid. Any suggestions on what I can put in front of her that she is likely to want to eat more than other food?

or take two convicts and add turpentine...

i make regular trips to different beaches to get substrate - the occasional car boot load punctuated by buckets here and there. same goes for rocks and driftwood. now here's the fun bit - because i haven't collected my own personal quarry i can remember where it all comes from, so when it turns out to be no use to me or i don't need all i took, i take it back this gets some rather wierd looks i can tell you - people are reasonably and on the whole comfortable with some people nicking rocks and sand, but when you are adding to the beach? :lol: the stuff that i have used, depending on what i have used it for will go back, but because substrate has an interesting habit of turning itself into a bio-hazard over time it often ends up in a landfill because taking it back to the beach would be, well, less responsible. talking to one of the staff at Phoenix landscaping supplies about rocks and gravel - they don't charge a whole lot for the material but because the shipping costs for moving tonnes of the stuff around are somewhat high. the rocks end up costing a few dollars a kilo, and when you consider that a lump of rock is a good way to conceal a couple of kilos you can start paying upwards of $250 for a nice looking display in a larger tank. Not being one to condone the strip-mining of our beaches and natural waterways I do look for options - other fish people who have stuff to spare, alternate mediums from plant stores (i can at least tell you a couple NOT to use ) - stuff from pet supply places etc. Quarries, landscapers and garden centers tend to have some nice looking stuff, but it is often not appropriate for fish tanks just due to its size or mineral composition, and when you take that into account the range of colours and grades of gravel gets narrowed down rapidly. Pet stores are obviously another place to look, but the expense is often prohibitive. it is one thing to pay $12 dollars for 5 litres of gravel, it is another thing to realise you need 50 litres before your tank is starting to look right, and although you could back-fill with something else and put the expensive stuff on top you have then mixed the expensive stuff with something else, and you probably had to get the back-filler from a beach anyway! after thinking about it this much i for one will be thinking twice before taking stuff from a beach (note i didn't say 'before not taking stuff...') perhaps someone should talk to the national body for quarries and see if we can get FNZAS discounts on gravel...

which is a real shame though i understand the thinking behind it the thing that bugs me is that people who front up loads of cash for resource consents are often allowed to take more from the beaches than would ever go missing by individuals with a couple of buckets...

in this particular instance that shouldn't be a problem as the tank is not going to have much light at all, but that information is going to be ULTrA useful in the long run! cheers

larger tanks work - if you have say, 100 tetra in a 6000L tank they will school, or at least look like they are schooling because they are so close together relative to the size of the tank. fear of the unknown is almost as effective as fear of a big ugly predator (or potential predator) so large open spaces work well. but then you also have to consider that fish will hide more the less places you give them to hide... you might find that your fish think they are schooling anyway, if they can see each other from their separate locations.

Can anyone suggest a medium for substrate that looks like white sand when under water, has a texture not unlike that of beach sand, will function long term for plant growth and won't dissolve into the water? i tried beach sand - the yellow-cream coloured stuff - but when wet it looked like the rest of the beach - dull grey. any ideas on this -or other colours/textures for that matter?

http://www.fnzas.org.nz/fishroom/18-dec-2005-1404-vp113999.html#113999 by popular request She is not for sale. When she has grown to breeding age she will be sent to a nunnery in the austrian highlands. Anyone who suggest another course of action, especially one that involves cross breeding with their strains, will be shot. i have a bullet with a blank 'hello my name is' sticker on it.

I finally had some fish spawn for me that are not convicts or bristlenose! Peppered Corys! I had to rescue the eggs from my community tank after Mystic told me that there was a mystery fish swimming around in a bunch of plants i gave her. I managed to get exactly 10 eggs and all of them survived! Feeding them on microworm at the moment In other news i now have well over 200 baby bristlenose - the breeding pair is quite mature and very well fed so their egg clusters appear to contain about 150 eggs

oh, and from recent experience - wait for the eggs to harden before moving them - i don't know how long this takes though (anyone?) but i would assume a few hours.

after the parents lay the eggs it can be a good idea to remove them then - they are egg scatterers and will eat their eggs if they find them.

interesting that, i added banana, admittedly the skins only, and i got a huge influx of daphnia... of course my own experience extends to the skin of a single banana added one time only so i don't have a huge sample size to go from Apparently brine shrimp eggs are collected from around the edges of brine lakes (or wherever...) as part of their reproductive cycle involves the eggs being wind-borne. I would surmise that, resource consent available, other live foods are harvested in a similar fashion, and if the midge swarms are anything to go by...

i think i have an idea... i found a midge fly in my house today and realise where i have seen them before - trout flys (for all of the 'formality' that common names have; we call them trout fly where i come from) And around this time of year you get swarms of them by the water, increasing towards new years' until it is almost impossible to drive a car alongside any body of water at night. i would bet that those flys used to be larvae... and i would bet that these places are where the sellers harvest them from. marshes and lakes, the further from civilisation the better... :bounce:

well...'cleaning' anyway... apparently the Hutt river has a nasty outbreak of 'blue green algae' at the moment... yep, i thought so too... until it was ignored completely! the fish then proved that it was hungry by eating a bunch of daphnia and some mozzy larvae... interesting though that lots of people have them... i wouldn't have thought so from all the conversations i've had about live food, although considering the yield i'm getting its really no wonder they slip peoples minds...

I was checking out my daphnia bins today in the late afternoon sun, amazed at the amount of daphnia swarming around mid-water as they do later in the day when i noticed something red wiggling around. upon closer inspection: links to larger image: 1600x1200 and i thought to myself... BLOODWORM! and it would appear, using this freeze dried stuff here as a comparison: links to larger image: 2272x1704 (yep...) that bloodworm indeed it was. So finally the mystery is solved. I never though i would be able to cultivate bloodworm in my own back yard. Of course i would need a back yard the size of texas to grow enough to feed my fish the way i use the frozen stuff i buy... Now for a little extra information for those less familiar with bloodworm: they are not worms, they are midge larvae. they (the larvae) live underwater and seem to like rotting leaf matter. And a little extra information about my daphnia: they are not for sale Anyway - is this a common thing for backyard bins or have i got a fluke on my hands? (i did only find one 'worm' as it was wriggling mid-water - i didn't bother looking much further)

i use a BOC standard mig welding fitting, a throw together solenoid unit from NORGREN and hire a BOC gas bottle for $9 a month. I screwed around with yeast for ages and eventually came to the conclusion that, although i had learnt a lot, i didn't want to do it any more. These days i only have to play with the setup once every year or two or when i set up a new tank. the other nice thing about it is that you have 5000 psi of pressure to play with, so you can put your diffuser at the bottom of the tank and not have to worry about the c02 finding an easier way out. because of this high amount of pressure you can split the supply between more than one tank. cost of gas tap: $140. solenoid approx $100. extra fittings to join it all up about another $30. (and trust me, if you go down this path you do want the solenoid)

that post would have come out so much better with a ':lol:' in it

sure, if you determine that it actually needs doing first...

allthough i'm sure it is a usless piece of information for those most likely more well informed than myself: those rj3 thingees, i'm sure i remember having trouble with them in the past because some phones (like office PABX units) use the outside pair whilst home phones use the inside pair... now tell me how useless that was!

hey MA, ltns. I'm wondering if it came with.. hang on, i gave you duck weed? i didn't even have any myself! :lol: na, i'm wondering if it is from the gravel we picked up. I would think that there is also a fair amount of salt in the gravel left over from our washing attempts which might be enough for it to survive. as for your duckweed, i have a tank full of duckweed cures that i'm happy to lend you

tim: i can supply you with a sample if you are interested in taking a closer look. now, i know many of you believe that i am breeding triffids, and i must stress that there is no undue panic required. Of course i'm not in a position to confirm, nor deny, that i am breeding triffids, but rest assured that their day will come, yes my pretties... one day...