Caryl

Don't know about the middle pronounciation but I read an article which said if the fish name ends in 'i' it is always pronounced 'eye' not 'ee'. If there are two 'i's at the end, both are accented, first one 'ee' and second one 'eye'.

I have just had a heart attack!!! At the beginning of this thread you said Labour wekend and then you put in brackets (October 19). I checked my calendar because I have just booked the ferry for the next weekend (25 - 28). One of my calendars also had Labour weekend on the 19th but the rest (and my diary) said it was the 28th. Your July newsletter also has the dates as Oct 26 - 28 so I hope this is the correct weekend. Do you know how long it took to get the bookings sorted?????????!!!!!!

Yeehah! Marlborough has just booked 2 vans on the ferry and will have 9 members heading to Napier for Labour weekend. Accommodation has been booked too. We are getting together items for auction - fish, plants and equipment. Look out Napier - here we come!!! PS. We have 2 or 3 spare seats (unless more club members join us) if someone needs a ride and we can pick you up as we pass - share fuel costs.

http://www.bio-elite.com/waterbridge.htm Check this site out. He has a water bridge between his tanks - different!

Once Cees finds out where exactly it is, and if it is accessible, I am happy to put up with ... er I mean put up a group at my place then take them over there to go digging. Grant knows the Takaka area reasonably well. We could do a day trip from Blenheim. It takes about 2 and a half hours to get from here to the top of the Takaka hill. Too far for a conference bus trip (and very windy - as in winding roads, not strong winds) but easy for someone who wants to stay a day or two extra and do the trip then (a lot harder to dig in the frost though!).

I must say I find the colours used on our site here are very restful (but it does have white in it). Hope your meeting accepts your board. BTW I didn't go on a junket with the boss, I AM the boss! I call myself the credit manager. Grant does the work and I manage to take the credit :lol:

Welcome Peter! I like the hoplo cats too - a good chunky fish with character.

Caryl said... > I got this from a 'local source (geochemist)', apparently there > is a big band of laterite in the takaka hills on the Golden bay > side (top of South Island). I said that?? How clever of me. Where did I say it? I don't know any geochemists. Did I say if it is accessible and where exactly it was? Grant goes over that way fairly often and could pick some up if it was beside the road (and not too heavy) and had a big sign and an arrow pointed at it with "Get your Laterite here" written on it.

It is my understanding you should only have one flying fox in a tank (someone will correct me if I am wrong). I had a flying fox once which was great until it grew. The older it got, the stroppier it got, and it kept chasing all the other fish. They are also very good at leaping out of your tank through the smallest of gaps! I like the bristlenose (ancistrus lineolatus) as an algae eater. It also depends on what sort of algae you want a fish to eat. Some algae is ignored by ALL fish!

I used to have them many years ago and they were fine but I think someone genetically modified them a few years ago and added a piranha and a Hoover gene. They now seem to spend more time chasing and sucking the sides off fish than they do eating algae. I would never get one again.

What holiday? We were on business and I am very tired! Home again now and just downloading 120 emails having not checked it for 2 days. Had a great time at the computer roadshow and saw some great new stuff which will be coming out soon. Filled up my goody bags and won a few small bits and pieces (no computers this time). Hi Daryl. Good to have you join us. I have been checking out your forum too. I still aren't too keen on your colour scheme though I think your magazine might be among the mail piled up on the bench. That's the trouble with going away - you come home and have to clear the emails, phone messages (only 10 of them), pick up the faxes and open all the mail.

I have never had a problem growing plants over an UGF. Just make sure you have plenty of substrate on top - at least 2" thick. Out of curiosity (after I was told UGFs are no good for plants) I once had a tank set up with an UGF over one half. I grew the same plants right across the whole length of the tank and could never see a difference in growing rates or health between those growing over the UGF and the others.

I see you mention gathering waterboatmen Rob. I was told to avoid them as the fish don't like them so much and they eat fish eggs. Is this not so in your experience?

I will ring a friend of mine later as I know he used to have them (was selling them at one point) but I am not sure if he still has any. Will let you know how I get on.

In vivo was going to be my guess. I am sure my mother would have preferred the whole pregnancy to be in vitro! I caused trouble even before I was born! Must have been all the extra swimming I did

Mine are around the other way - I have 3 levels of Siporax (ceramic round things) and only one of filter wool. The filter wool will clog quickly with all the fine stuff going through so may be slowing it down. I have never actually measured the flow rate on my filter but am aware you never get the rates promised in the advertising When I first clean my filter out the water flow is so strong it splashes against the glass lid but this only lasts about a day then it drops again to a slower flow. As time goes by the flow gets slower as the media trap the muck. When it gets so slow I can't see the force of the water as it comes out the return thingy, I clean the filter.

No they couldn't - that was why we had to keep cooling it. Consider the temperature of sea water (it doesn't warm up much on the Kaikoura coast). The rock pools we collected from certainly warm up in the sun but only for a short period. When the tide comes in it cools down again. They are only designed to cope with heat for the period between tides. Higher temps for days on end kills them very quickly - and boy do they smell! (says she speaking from experience)

Oops :oops: wrong word eh? What was the right word then Derek? I meant 'in the womb' as I am sure you guessed.

We were keeping the tank cool by freezing 2 litre juice containers filled with water then floating them in the tank. The poor old freezer was running non stop trying to freeze them as we needed 15 of them (both 2 and 3 litre) to rotate enough to keep the temp down. We now have an air conditioner in the room so perhaps keeping the temp down would not be such a problem next time.

One of our favourite tanks we set up was a rock pool marine. We got a 3ft tank then headed out to the Kaikoura coast (without the tank - we took big plastic containers). We loaded up with algae covered rocks, sea lettuce for food, and collected pool critters and sea water. Back home we arranged the rocks in the tank (I think we used an external AquaClear for a filter), poured the sea water in then added the critters. We had a number of triplefins (salt water cockabullies) a little rock cod, lots of shrimps, anemones, chitons, a hermit crab, a sea cucumber and (don't tell anyone as I believe they were illegal) a little paua and a crayfish. All were picked up in the rock pools. At one stage we even had a little octopus but he escaped one night and was fluffed to death on the carpet. It was a fascinating tank to watch. Shrimp don't look too interesting in a pool but seen side on in a tank you can see they have red knees (and more than two of them!). The patterns in the fish were amazing too. On weekends we would head to Whites Bay and get more sea lettuce and sea water. We figured there would be lots of little microscopic stuff in the water for our critters to eat. Apart from that we rarely fed them. Our biggest problem with it was the heat in summer. The tank needed to be about 10 degrees C and no higher than 15 but our room averaged 28 degrees all summer, never dropping below about 22. I would like to set a tank up again but with a proper cooling unit. I have a tank - just no-where to put it! You are allowed to go dive and catch fish but I would not do so because the fish in the sea are used to swimming in large areas and grow too big.

Some of us don't 'get hooked'. I have always liked fish and we have always had animals of various sorts since I was a toddler. We had fish ponds as I grew up. To me it was natural to have fish. I must have been 'hooked' in vitro!

Welcome Mitsy. Koi are illegal in our country but we certainly have goldfish. I have been planning to build a pond for about 20 years now - one day I might actually get it built!

Hope your fishkeeping is better than your story telling Campbell! :lol: What sort of filtration did you go for in the end?

I hope your club gets up and running well reef. It is my understanding that a number of members of the Auckland Fishkeepers Assoc. also keep marines, or brackish fish. Perhaps you may consider affiliating to the FNZAS some time? It would put you in contact with other marine hobbyists in NZ (not everyone has internet). Good luck to you 8)

Sorry you didn't like my attempt at Latin Pegasus . I would like to point out that most schools don't teach Latin these days so I have no idea of the 'rules'. Parlez vous Francais?