Sophia

am tempted to get my beasts another variety of food but would I be wasting my time with these?

there has been a lot of fishy business in here over the last few days now I wait for the wrigglers!

a picture please Mr Henward?

It didn't take too long for you to develop MTS looking forward to the log photos, I enjoyed your first one :bounce:

what were the spotty fish shaped sort of like kahawai?

when will you eat the parore? 8)

while I can't stand algae in my freshwater tank I quite like the diatom on the rocks as it gives it a more natural and less bare look luckily I don't have the funds to start a marine tank but it's interesting to read your thread. I was enjoying Morcs too until he took the tank down!

one day...

the beach where I found the wood was Orere Point and yes I need the plants to grow a bit more.. the stumps will look better when they have more greenery I like the wood how it is - there are 4 bits in there

Auckland Uni is holding Courses and Careers Day soon - you should be able to get some more info on degrees etc there. The other institutions probably will have theirs at a similar time.

I bought a new Eheim pickup 2006 for my 50cm/33litre tank. All was well, filter functioning 100% correctly. Noticed that when attached to the glass with it's suckers it made quite a noise. (Note to Ira - I mean louder than a fridge, not put my ear on the tank to hear it loud 8) ) Holding the filter away from the glass made it virtually silent. After some scuffling around in the garage my husband produced a stick of plastic and stuck it into a hole in a rock with Aquakneadit. He put some rubber on the bottom of the rock for protection and even less vibration. Attached one set of suckers to the plastic, put it back in the tank and hey presto, almost silent filter again. Once the plants in the tank get bigger (see thread in killie forum) there will be little evidence of the plastic. Filter workaround Filter - from this angle you can barely tell the filter is not attached to the glass

Here is my new set up. Has had fish in it for just under a week. The fish are 2 male fundulopanchax scheeli and 3 girls. The big male ('Big Daddy', for want of a better name ) is the boss of the tank except at feeding time when the little male zips around hogging the best worms. Big Daddy is quite active, he plays in the current from the filter like a guppy. They are interesting fish to watch, I'm quite attached to them already. After having mostly dither or 'fraidy-fish before, it's rewarding to have the fish come and wait by the dropper at dinner time or bump into my hand when I'm poking about in the tank. Tank is 50cm long, 30cm high and 28 wide. At present there is about 33.5 litres in there. The back is painted with Dulux Selwyn blue. 3 coats to make it completely opaque. Filter is an Eheim pickup 2006 - contrary to all advice I bought this instead of a box or sponge as it was the smallest and quietest filter. You can swivel the head and adjust the oxygen and power of the water coming out so I have it pointing into the corner on it's lowest output, but even at it's most powerful the current is still minimal. I would recommend this to others with a small tank. If fry getting sucked in becomes an issue later I will cover the base with stocking. Last one I had had fry living in there for a week or more at time quite safely and obviously getting plenty of food. You may notice the curious filter/rock/stick arrangement, I will post a seperate thread about that in DIY as I think it's odd enough to get it's own thread. Heater is an Eheim 50 watt. Substrate - black grit - to keep the cloudiness at a minimum when setting up I rinsed under the tap one net full at a time. A net as fine as a stocking this was. Worked a treat. Light is a chinese 2 tube thing, it came with 2 8 watt T5s giving out 14,000 K. I had it working with both tubes initially, but am testing it with just 1 - saving a bulb and seeing if less brightness makes the plants green up a bit more. The fish behave the same in all the light variations of the room. Plants - planted in the gravel - twisted val, Hydrocotyle/Pennywort , tiger lotus Stuck into holes in the driftwood - left, bolbitis/congo fern (I need more!); middle, small stump narrow leaf java fern and ordinary java fern; right, normal java fern; far right, little piece of Windelov fern and java fern Floating - riccia and duckweed The val and riccia are recovering from an over anxious dose of being sterilised (there are conflicting opinions about bleach on this message board and I picked the wrong one!! Don't use bleach EVER on these plants :-? ). Lotus also was affected by my vigilance but it has sprung back! The upside is that there are no snails in my tank! Fertiliser - JBL balls, Flourish comprehensive Whole tank & homebuilt cabinet Side view of the best bit of driftwood Frontal view Another frontal Small boy Boys & a girl One of the girls Big Male admiring himself Big Male playing in the current

these people are selling some of a similar name - I presume this is not the shop you mention... they might know the latin name viewtopic.php?f=24&t=47484

can you gently float a pellet (or part of) on the surface? if you can do that it will slowly disintegrate and the bits will fall down and your shoaling fish will go after them as they look alive

as an experiment I have half buried 2 tufts of riccia in my gravel to see if it will make a carpet like in the Takashi Amano tank books. If that doesn't work I might cover rocks and make a rock carpet or corner or something

there's a lot of info in here on cycling the tank viewtopic.php?f=4&t=47340 8)

tonight I sucked some off with a dropper so will see if that helps too

that's promising

I found some driftwood on a beach some time ago and soaked it till it sank. I'm pretty sure it is pohutukawa as some other pieces were quite red wood. Certainly not pine, and not rotting. The water was always relatively clear and I changed it every weekend. A few weeks after it had sunk I found it would start to grow a brown slime algae - it would start in the hollows like a mist gathers in the valley (poetic I know) and then slowly creep around the log but suspended around it, not stuck to it. If you poke it it comes away and floats about and then sinks. I thought it was because it was in a bucket with no current and incandescent lighting etc. It's now been in the tank for a week and it's started again. It doesn't seem to affect the plants growing in the wood. It's not brown diatom algae so I'm not going to buy an oto to eat it. I have got it on notice at the moment. If it doesn't clear up or turn into something the fish like then I will chuck it out and start again. Has anyone else had this? What did you do? What does it evolve into?

We just used standard hinges that are set inside the door and inside the cabinet on little blocks of wood. They were sprayed black with the screws so they matched the handle. My husband rigged up a latch to the back of the handle so it's like a gate latch. On my last cabinet there was a magnet and the fish jumped every time I shut the door so didn't want that again.

my tank came with lots of excess silicone - we could only find double sided blades at the supermarket so we wrapped them with masking tape to make them stiffer and safe, and got the silicone off with that. A helluva lot of work but worth it compared to what it would have looked like. Masking the tank first is definitely the way to go

The design is good but I will have to be the first to say that MDF isn't the best thing to make a tank stand out of as water seepage will eventually turn it to wet cardboard and there goes your tank. If you are carpentarily inclined and wanting to do it cheap you could use tanalised fence palings, my husband just built me this and the total cost was about $130 including stain, varnish, screws etc. This was done without any power tools even.... (he now has an electric planer) (I lie, he used a router around the edges and a drill for the screws haha) This fits my 50cm long x 28cm wide tank and like yours the cabinet is about a metre tall so you can sit on a chair next to it and see right in I asked for lots of shelves too :oops:

Adrienne it's brilliant well done indeed

looks very nice indeed I see your cories are having deep discussions about their new home

thank you BikBok and Jennifer for sharing I've got the water and plants in and taken some initial readings for now