Munkii

I'm looking for pest snails as a additional food source for my clown loaches. Keen to pick up from around central Auckland. Thanks!

I'm looking to get ~4 twisted val plants for a new setup of mine. I'm based in Auckland and would prefer to pickup, but happy to pay for shipping if that's what it takes. Thanks in advance!

You could try some old under gravel filter panels maybe. Li@m, where do you find awesome rocks like that?

Thanks for the tip! I assume that means I need to pick up a hardness test kit at Hollywood this weekend?

Hi all, sorry for the possibly stupid question. I recently acquired a glass CO2 drop tester, but the instructions that came with it are all in Chinese. I understand that it works by measuring the pH of the water in the little ball at the end. So my question is, do I need to make sure the water I put into the ball is perfectly pH neutral? I know my tap water has a pH of 7.5 and I am worried this will effect my CO2 reading. Thanks in advance!

Awesome shrimp. Is that stream publicly accessible?

Looks great It that Java moss on the rocks? How did you attach it?

I'm thinking of using a reptile humidifier get moss growing in a dry start tank. Something like this: Has anyone tried this before? Does it work? Does anyone have a humidifer that they want to get rid of?

In the past I have heard that native shrimps will eat black beard algae, but I don't have any experience to verify it

Be careful. My outside trough changes from 21 deg during the day down to 16 deg over night.

Ahh! The Bullys are actually eating the shrimps I need to find a home for them quickly :facepalm:

Shrimp Pictures Click on each image for a large version (and again for an even bigger version) Free swimming. About 1 cm long They often hang out at the base of the rocks Size comparison with a bully. The bullys chase them a bit, but I haven't seen any actually get eaten Another fish pic since he posed nicely. They're super bold considering they were wild caught

Depending on who else you have in the tank the eggs will be fine to stay where they are. I kept corys with dwarf gouramis and they bred and raised young just fine (had to plug the filter inlet though). In my other tank the angel and clown loach eat the eggs almost immediately. I don't even have time to try and get them out.

After not finding any shrimp last weekend, I decided to try a different spot to see if I would have more luck. I found a little stream flowing though the back of New Lynn along the back of Olympic Park. It was much more over over grown with vegetation than the last place I looked but still full of road run off. I had a good look around before dipping my net in. I saw a bunch of little fish, but nothing that looked like a shrimp. I waved my net through the vegetation to see what I could find and I ended up catching about five tiny little shrimp. They're so small that I initially thought they were mosquito larvae, but after checking one out closely in the bucket, they are indeed shrimp!! :happy1: I spent another half an hour wading around and managed to catch a few more, but they seemed to go into hiding after a while. Still, I managed to get just over 10 in a small patch of stream, so they seem to be pretty plentiful. I'll post some pictures of them tomorrow. The water in my tank is a bit cloudy at the moment from all the stream debris that got caught along the way. There were also several patches of glosso growing in the stream. I paid $6 for a tiny little pot a few weeks ago, so I grabbed a chunk of that into my bucket too. I'm thinking I'll experiment with growing it emersed in a spare tank.

These fish have been taken from a stream last weekend, put into an empty tank which I filled up with the water I took from the stream, and have only been there for a few days. Do you really think the "no release" rule applies to these fish as well? I find it hard to imagine that they would have any diseases which weren't present in the stream before.

I couldn't find the eel when I came home tonight. After a bit of searching it looks like he squeezed himself up the intake of my pump and ended up getting chopped to pieces by the impeller :tears: I feel bad for taking him... The eel did seem to eat the pellet food I put in there, but I can't tell if the bullys have eaten anything yet. I'll be dropping them back in the stream they came from in the next day or two. This weekend I'll be trying a new stream to see if I can find any shrimps somewhere else

FULL POST HERE Can any of you guys please give me advice on how to care for these little guys?

I've been dying to get some fresh water shrimp for my tank every since I read about them on here a few weeks ago. Today I armed myself with a net and a bucket and decided to go fishing. My chosen fishing spot was on the river which flows out of Western Spings towards the sea as I was confident this would be fresh water and not polluted or anything. Exact location here. I found a slow flowing spot and waited on the bank to see what was in there. There were lots of little fish sunbathing and darting about, but there were no shrimps to be seen at all Maybe because the stream was quite fast flowing? I decided to try and get a closer look at the fish, so I spent the next 10 minutes unsuccessfully trying to catch one in my little net. I was starting to think about giving up and heading home when low and behold a 10cm elver came wiggling down the stream and right into my open net! Click for a larger image Re-enthused, I managed to catch two of the little fish also. Can anyone identify what species they are? Click for a larger image I have them home now and have put them in the tank I had prepared for keeping shrimp (glosso and hair grass). I poured all the water from my bucket into the tank so it worked out at about 50% stream water and 50% cycled tank water. I accimatised them in a bag for about 20 minutes and they seem to be settling in pretty well. I realize the eel is quickly going to get too big to keep in a tank, but I'd like to keep him for a while at least if I can. What are the odds that I could convince these little guys to eat flake food or algae wafers? I snagged a chunk of oxygen weed from the river in-case they might eat that, but I haven't put it in the tank yet as it's covered in little black snails :-? Here's how the tank looked this morning before my new fishy friends were added. I've been keeping it at 20 deg since that's the lowest my heater will go.

Apart from the obvious things like towels and a siphon, my most useful tool is my planting tweezers. So much easier than planting by hand!

Sounds like a good idea. I'll try this, thanks

Hi Everyone The glosso and hair grass in my small tank is growing steadily, but not super fast. Have increased the ferts dosing up to the values recommended on the bottles (was using a half dose before). Other changes this week: Removed stock hood Added two 9w lights (18w on a 5g tank) Added Aquaclear 200 filter Added 50w heater set to 20 deg Added two smaller rocks I sold a bunch of the Twisted Val from my main tank so I moved things around a bit. This tank had a tendency to get green water, so in the last two weeks I have been dosing ferts in an effort to stop this. This has made the twisted val grow a lot, but the algae has increased also Since dosing ferts in this tank the gradual tend to towards green water seems to be about the same, but the green spot algae on the glass has been growing a lot more. I am hoping some of you guys can give me some suggestions as to what I should try next. Some of my ideas are: Keep curtains shut during the day (tank is not in direct light, but the room does get a lot of sun light) Reduce the lighting (currently on 9h per day). The problem with going less is that I like to have the light on in the morning when I feed them and also in the evening when I am relaxing Increase fert dosing. It's a 35g tank, and I have been dosing 5mL of Excel each weekend and 1mL of Flourish comprehensive daily Get a bigger variety of plants (currently it's almost all twisted val only) Do bigger water changes. I normally do a 15% change each week, so maybe ferts are building up each week? What do you experts recon? :smln:

I've always found a clown loach to be the best snail solution

I've had bronze corys before, but all of them got bigger than that

The thing that helped me to lose weight was realizing that eating less is 10x more effective than exercising. I also got the FatSecret app on my phone because I'm a nerd and the graphs and numbers were motivating for me.

I really like the double layer look. Awesome!