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Munkii

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Posts posted by Munkii

  1. I must ask where did you find/get this white plastic on the bottom of your tank? I'm looking for something like it to take the weight of some large rocks.

    You could try some old under gravel filter panels maybe.

    Li@m, where do you find awesome rocks like that?

  2. 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!

  3. Shrimp Pictures

    Click on each image for a large version (and again for an even bigger version)

    whRSYs.jpg Free swimming. About 1 cm long

    BtbR2s.jpg They often hang out at the base of the rocks

    HS7Hjs.jpg Size comparison with a bully. The bullys chase them a bit, but I haven't seen any actually get eaten

    Lz5SAs.jpg Another fish pic since he posed nicely. They're super bold considering they were wild caught

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. That is absolutely correct. You can not release back into the wild as you may be releasing diseases, even though the fish look healthy, which will have the potential to wipe out our native fish populations. Catching fish etc to put in native tanks is not a game, its something to be taken seriously.

    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.

  7. 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

  8. 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!

    Ts03hs.jpg Click for a larger image

    Re-enthused, I managed to catch two of the little fish also. Can anyone identify what species they are?

    yL0K3s.jpg 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.

    onXLUs.jpg

  9. Hi Everyone :wave:

    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

    ga4wN.jpg

    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 :(

    w36PU.jpg

    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:

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