twinkles

you can get alot of things from the hardware store, which is lucky for us since there's no lfs here. I've bought airline, suction cups and ones with hooks on them, gravel, pots and light tubes from there.

i have one with wire hooks to hook over the edge glass, made from an old coathanger, and one with suction cups from mitre10, ones which actually stick lol.

well then maybe you should offer to take over the tank for free

there's three on trademe for $12.50, I wonder how much they paid if they want that much back after a few weeks

yep GAE's eat the algae and leftover food the best, but they grow fast too. One would outgrow a 2ft easily in less than a year, ours is nearly too big for our 80cm long after less than that.

Not personal experience - i read somewhere once about a tank being half emptied from someone doing that and saved it in my memory I can see it happening, one of my tanks is hard to reach into so i peg a string onto the top edge to pull it out, and its always wet at the top. I just let mine sit on the bottom, they fluff up quite high and the killies i have seem to like them there.

it'll be back...mine is

duckweed is good for hiding the babies too, if you can stand the sight of it in the tank

i rinse mine with hot water from the kettle a few times before using them, to make sure any dye/chemicals from the factory are washed out properly and then they sink. Also don't be clever and tie a longer peice of wool on to loop over the side of the tank for pulling it out, they can siphon the water out

you must be naughty then

i have some dark blue...and still one of the first ones i made, which is brown/white/cream multi coloured - don't go there. Its so hard to see the eggs :-?

i don't think a kauri would grow there anyway, all the trees are the sort that are suited to the low swampy land - cabbage, nikau, flax and ferns etc.

what sort of trees are protected?

probably not, but they can say that they are and the area is in dispute, which would through a spanner in the works for the council.

It could be said to decrease the prices if the birds were gone i guess, but houses are so darn cheap here anyway i doubt it would be taken into effect. Finally got a call back from the person at doc today, and she was brilliant, sounds like they'll be diving in to help as much as they can. First thing she's doing is going through the maori land court records today, to see if the 'un-owned' sections may have been handed back as customary land, no one had thought of that. If that is the case that'll be the end of the councils plans in one swoop, i like to seem them get up the guts to mess with that The other idea is that they may have been handed back to the crown as reserve land, but this is less likely, and if it is the case there's a possibility that the local iwi could announce they're putting in a claim on it as land that should have been returned to them. So looking good

i'd expect a 300L tank to handle the discus no problems, thats a big volume of water so if you're concerned about the amonia from it being uncycled just do frequent water changes for a while.

my fish wardrobe hold 6 two foot tanks, plus storage on top and underneath and is 4ft long - alot more weight per foot of floor space. It has 6 upright 2x3 poles that go top to bottom, with the shelves attached to them, then on the bottom the uprights sit on 2x3s running longways, so the weight of the legs is distributed along the full length rather than the 6 points where the legs would touch the floor. The floor is supporting it no worries, that way the weight is spread across 4 joists evenly.

Now from their point of view, the problems are 1) there are some walnut trees and things growing on the stopbank, which need to go - we have no issue with that of course 2)the area in the far left bottom, going along further out of view, needs some new big rocks added to the existing pile to help contain the river. They want to build a temporary road in from the council land (far right) to bring a truck in to dump the rocks. There is existing almost complete and clear road acces from the right, straight off the street, we want them to use this. 3) (and this is the main sticking point) - they want every peice of vegetation in sight cleared, the land in the middle section raised 1/2 metre average, and it turned into a paddock. Their reasons for this are that if the river floods, trees and things will be washed down river, lodge in the bush, then redirect the water flows into the stopbank, which might collapse part of it. It the stopbank gives in there the river will go straight through my house :-? The stopbank was built after the river did exactly that in the 50's, apparently it was as high as the window frames on the houses across the road lol. Anyway, the best solution i can think of, would be if they built a fence say from the top right edge of the bank, to the bottom middle edge of the existing fence, to try and direct trees etc back into the river. Do we have any experts (or good google people) who can offer any other ways around it, or any examples of something like my idea being used?

just spoken to 'the man' at horizons, he's coming to meet with us all next wednesday. so that gives us a week to put into a plan exactly what we want, and how it can fit in with what they want. To start with, here's the aerial map of it the long white line along the top is the stopbank, about 3 metres high, to stop floods getting past. the white line down from that is the fence line, between the wetlands and bush and the paddocks on the other side. Red is the trees that need to go, green is the natives, blue is the water.

plenty of that slimy stringy algae in the swamp now, i'll just take to lying in it drinking beer and i'll look like an ogre in no time! Now lets see the contractors mess with me 8)

lol need to find me one of them to protect our swamp

Congratulations :bounce: So thats what you've been busy with lately

here's mr or mrs ducky and yes, her head is behind the tree and reflected in the water, she's not a mutant lol and aren't mossy old logs beautiful?

time for an update... spoke to the boss of the guy we've been dealing with at horizons on friday, thought it was worth giving him a ring to see if he had any idea what was going on. And not suprisingly he had no idea that there was a wetland and native trees there, and no idea that his subordiling had ignored the communities wishes. So he's supposed to be getting back to me this week to let me know where he stands and if they'll be backtracking on their desicions to take another look at things. Meantime i finally got some kid-free time today :bounce: so i went for a good look to see what else i could see. Found a pair of grey ducks in the smaller hidden pond They hid when they saw me so i didn't go closer, but saw they had an egg on the edge of the pond, just lying on the ground, i gather that means they don't want it or its a dud or something? Don't know if they might have had a proper nest there somewhere. Also found some daphnia yah! In 'our' swamp, there was heaps of it, and loads of other little bugs and things that weren't there a week ago. Saw one little thing that looked like a diving beetle? About 3mm at most, black and beetle shaped, and it swam down into the algae when i looked at it. Bought a cup of water home, it has about 10 daphnia in it.

which one is that bikbok? Will have to add it to my 'must visit' list