HummingBird

Here in Auckland they make you fence anything deeper than 30cm, pond or swimming pool regardless. The goldfish in our pond here at work are breeding right now too, it's neat to watch because they're so uncharactaristically active!

Wow mine don't really leave any visable waste at all, I do feed them shrimp pellets though so maybe their diet makes a difference. I just did a water change on the 1.5ft tank that they're in for the first time in about a month and the water that I siphoned out of the gravel was almost crystal clear and there's at least 20 of them in the tank, if not more. The filter for the tank is an aqua clear hang on, the tank is way overfiltered so maybe that affects it too. I haven't cleaned the filter in the 8 months the tank has been going though : /

Yeah I get them in my daphnia containers too.

Except for Ramshorns - they rock

Trumpet snails are even more prolific than these snails you know - they're live bearing! It took me a total rehaul of one of my tanks to get rid of them.

I've treated Clown Loaches for exteme white spot with copper and had them survive fine.

Don't know what you mean by contaminate, but it doesn't harm fish.

I've had Val and Riccia react very well to Flourish Excel, even to double dosing. In my experience WCMM's don't cope well with that though :-?

I probably won't be able to come, I'm working till 8.30 so :-? Let me know how it goes though

Hmm, well I had a chilly bin that was about 50 litres ish and I used a little less than a teaspoon I think. Too much probably wouldn't have a harmful affect on the wood, just make sure you wash it off well afterwards or it'll affect your tank's pH.

I had mine in a tank that was really heavily planted. They only ate the buds of this one type of grass like plant, they left all the other plants alone. There were a fair few plants in there too, so you should probably be ok. Here's a pic to give you an idea:

I did it for a few hours, just left it in there for most of the day. Obviously you wouldn't do it in the tank, the fish wouldn't like water being that hot :-?

They are partial to eating some types of plants though.

Using a combination of baking soda and hot water worked for me. It sucks the air out of it apparently.

"Breeding pair of Convict Cichlids" and "Male and female convict cichlid" are exactly the same thing though

I've never tried to breed agassizi but I had a couple of males in my 4ft community and he bossed everyone around, including some large adult angelfish. He killed one of my clown loaches and a siamese fighter too, so I got rid of him :-?

What's the 'water clarifier' anyways? Is it a floculant? If so that's probably it. Why did you use it anyways? If your water is cloudy you should treat the cause, not the symptom.

Yeah, I got all my daphnia from one anscestor that I treated with methaline blue and other stuff to kill anything.

$70 each is a little extreme for a Nutrafin one, you can get them for $30 on Trademe.

Daphnia are tiny crustaceans that live in water

What sort of 'bad' bacteria forms anyways? The bacteria that converts nitrates to nitrogen gas is anaerobic and so it could live in there...

Actually Water Boatmen are harmless filter feeders, much the same as Daphnia. From http://www.flyfishalberta.com/entomolog ... immers.htm: "Waterboatmen are dendritic feeders, meaning they mainly feed on dead and decaying organic matter such as dead vegetation, algae, or even algae of other species."

I've got some Hornwort in my WCMM breeding tanks just because it's a fine leafed plant that they'll like to lay their eggs on, well it turns out that there were some Backswimmer eggs, and these hatched at about the same time as my WCMM eggs. I thought I had caught all of them but two eluded me, and I just witnessed a 2mm Backswimmer holding onto and presumably injecting venom into a 1mm baby WCMM! When I started to chase it with a net it let the baby go but it was already dead :-? so beware backswimmers everyone!

Mine were a little younger than that, just over 7cm long and I had 3 females and one male in the tank. They had a 2ft tank to themselves and chose to breed in a tight little spot inside a resin castle. They got courgette basically every day and pleco tabs, spirulina discs, etc as well.

Yeah any type of oil can go on top of the water and stop oxygen exchange.