twinkles

can i butt in and ask.. do you think they'd like traps made out of coloured/opaque glass? I'm thinking of making a nice big one soon but thought perhaps making three sides and the bottom out of something opaque might help her relax? I know in the small one i've got they spend alot of time swimming at the side trying to get out.

lol i'm starting to sound like a chip campaigner. Yes dog regos were for hytadids control, now its largely revenue gathering in most places. Except waitakere, they do a brilliant job. Feral cats aren't the accompalished killing machines ferrets are, but cause more damage cause there's more of them. We need a government supported trapping program and desexing to do anything about them. I wish our council here would do something, even providing free traps and euthing would go someway towards helping, we're surrounded by bush and national parks and all they care about is possum control. Cat traps work just as well on ferrets as livingart has shown, and i get sick of lending out my one trap to people and having ten more waiting to use it.

compulsory microchipping is great for lots of reasons, never mind the government motives for bringing it in. For dogs ending up at the pound without their collars, its the difference between going home with their owner or being pts, ditto for any hurt dog taken into the spca. Its the only guaranteed way to prove ownership of a stolen dog, and there's plenty of cases of stolen dogs being taken to the vet for something by their new owner, and being found out by the details on their chip. You can put all your dogs details on it, so if they are found the spca etc has instant access to their medical history and ten different contact numbers for you. For cats, if a cat ends up in a feral trap it will usually be put to sleep if it doesn't have a collar or chip, and collars can be very dangerous. If a cat is lost after moving house and picked up miles away, its still easy to trace the owner. Of course, it all depends on the owners complying with it, and registering them on the proper database, and keeping their details up to scratch. I've had a couple of dogs from the pound who were chipped, but not on any of the databases, so the chips were useless. Both lovely pedigree dogs who must have had a loving owner once, who knows what happened to them, but if the chips were done right we could at least have found out more about the dogs, their age etc, and saved having them shaved for speying when they were done already. I don't know why farmers are so against it, i would have thought $10 for chipping would be worth it to help protect their often highly valuable dogs from being stolen.

thats good to hear hopefully its made the shop rethink their selling strategy I'd love a marine tanks, but know i don't have anywhere near the know-how to attempt it, or the money. One day...

fruit is seeds in a way or seed pods are fruit either way seeds come from flowers you'll have to get a second plant flowering at the same time, then run between them with a cotton tip to fertalise them unless it was a hermaphrodite flower?

yup pics are a must she sounds magnificent, never seen one that big I used to get funny looks taking my daughter to feed the eels at western springs, she loved it, beautiful animals

we used to have a pair of female bettas in with our guppies, without any problems. However i'm told lots of female fighters don't get on too well together, and ours did, so it must depend on the individual.

ok, will check carefully when i siphon the gravel later, they're probably laying all over the place. There's 3 girls in there, one huge one and two smaller.

i wondered about that, but i pulled out 30 fry over two weeks, plus alot were eaten and sucked up the filter before i could catch them. But they might still be laying on the gravel too, how many eggs do the girls usually lay?

ok thanks, will take a look at yours. just frustrating that they were doing better left to their own devices

Firstly, my gardneri blues have been breeding very well for a couple of months, laying on the gravel and with me siphoning out the fry once they get to a couple of weeks old and start coming out to be caught. Determined to do things properly at last, i made them a mop last week, which they love, and am getting 10 or so eggs a day. Am putting eggs into a container with water from parents tank and floating it on the fry tank, with some meth blue, but lots are going fungused, that is, of the almost week old ones, 6/20 have eyes, the rest went fuzzy. The newer ones i've taken a couple of fungus ones out and the rest i can't be sure on yet. So what am i doing wrong? I'm sure they had higher hatch rates when left in the tank, or maybe I just didn't see the bad eggs. Is it the lack of water movement in the containers? Had a search on google and found two other ways which sounded good, either putting the whole mop in a little tank with an airstone, or squeezing the water out, ziplocking it, and putting it back in water after 2-3 weeks. So has anyone tried these ways and want to share how well they work? Second question, I had a beautiful, perfect male who was doing all the breeding, but he jumped out of the tank 2 weeks ago, and now the other male has taken over, but his colouring on his tail isn't the same, the yellow/orange on the top only goes 1/3 the length down his tail, where on the first boy it was the whole length to match the bottom. Does it matter? Should i keep breeding him, or try to find another one with better markings? What are they supposed to look like exactly? I don't really want to replace him, I love him and he's having fun with the girls, but don't want to breed badly comformed fish if thats what it is. Thoughts?

Dog rego does nothing because it isn't set up to do anything, except collect money. If you had to have a license to own an entire dog, and every dog who's owner wasn't licenced was picked up and rehomed/euthanised, it wouldn't take long before the majority of people would be desexing them, pups would all be sold desexed, dogs would be worth more with less people breeding indiscriminatly, and we'd have less problems with aggressive/wandering dogs, since most of those are un-neutered boys. Need firm laws, no second chances for people once the rules are in place, and to motivate people to dob in anyone breaking them. It sounds like too much government control, and people would hate it, but send all the dog owners who are against it to the pound to choose who gets to die that day and they would change their minds. Anyway, to bring it back to the point, ferrets are in the same unfortunate position as alot of other animals, being hated for returning to their instincts and the wild after their owners got bored. Blame the people, not the animals. Good on you for trapping this guy though, and i'm sure he was killed humanely.

I think ferrets get an unfair deal really. Yes they're awful pests, but when they were allowed as pets they were far more controlled than cats or rabbits, it was rare to see an undesexed one for sale, and they were less likely than kittens to run wild and establish a colony. I owned several lovely ferrets from ferret rescue, who were all good with other animals but very carefully contained anyway, and one nasty nasty ferret from a bad background who gave me a few very painful bites, I don't doubt the last one could have survived in the wild but he couldn't have bred, and would have died off before too long. The blame for wild ferrets lies mostly on the fur farmers, there were several farms around the country who went bust and released their stock into the wild, 100's of starving entire ferrets ready to hunt and breed. Instead of a blanket ban, they should have enforced what was already happening, and made it illegal to own an entire ferret without a license, and had them mircochipped and registered. Most ferret owners were very responsible. Then they should have done the same thing with cats, and rabbits. I've got 22 cats here looking for homes, all because someone didn't want them anymore - they moved house, the cat had too many kittens, the novelty wore off.... All of them would be out roaming wild if we didn't trap them, and a few more controls on cat breeding and ownership would prevent it. I'd hate to see how many feral cats there are in the national parks around here.

was looking at one of those big airpumps to run bubble walls or sponge filters in all our tanks, but i thought the filter in this one made enough current and splashes by itself? I guess i could put one in it anyway.

oh and tank is 40L

its got a 400L/h filter, with a trickle bar thing the water comes out of, lots of movement i thought?

jeepers thats alot of guppies

good advice, i'll be passing that on too lol. Heater was fine at first, must have jammed or something.

Yes, i think the heater must have come on in the wee hours and stayed on, temp would have gone up fast, the thermoteter only goes to 30 so could even have been hotter, felt like hot bathwater. It was 25-26 the night before so quite a change. I can see the sense in having several smaller heaters in big tanks, will be doing that when i get a big tank set up. And not using second hand heaters without testing them for a few days first. They were glowlight ones too, i did read somewhere they're a bit less hardy than zebras.

apparently so, recomended temp is lower than for most tropicals. I think they would have been happier without a heater at all Catfish seem fine, happy as, temp is almost back to normal. Shame about my pretty danios though Getting a big tank next week, so will get some more once its set up.

Woke up this morning and checked the fish, and one tank was superhot and all the danios dead Heater was going still so i guess the thermostat is buggered. I got it with the tank a few days ago, temp's been fine till now. Water was about 30 deg, have taken the lid off and opened the filter to let it cool slowly, heater is out and i've put another one in that i know works well. There's a couple of baby whiptails in there, they seem fine thankfully, but is there anything else i should do? Put a little bit of cold water in but don't want to make it cold too quickly. I guess the lesson here is not to trust second hand heaters, will buy new from now on. It was only a 50watt, if I hadn't of done such a thourough job insulating the tank they probably would have been ok.

**shudders**

have put fishies in there now. Its only that cold once or twice a year at night. Tanks are packed around with batts, front open, and have a insulated blanket to cover them with at night, the heaters are higher than needed for the size so i'm sure they'll be fine. I'd love to insulate the whole room and fill it with fish, but will have to wait till i'm rich. They look snug in their little igloo

I used a piece of glass to divide off the end of our guppy tank. Just got it cut a few mm wider than the inside of the tank, wedged it in there, and buried the bottom in the gravel. Its tight enough to stop the guppy fry getting through, but still lets the water through a little bit.