Algae on my Koura

[ninjafroglet]

My Koura has got a bit of an algae covering, are there any ways to remove it that won't harm him that will be fairly fast acting.

Thanks in advance

[purplecatfish]

I have visions of a koura with a nice distinguished black beard or even a goatee. :lol:

Or was that a young koura with a bad case of spots :lol:

But if it was green algae you could get a algae eater which he could snack on later. :roll:

Seriously what kind of algae?

[phoenix44]

can you use an old toothbrush to get it off?

i dont know how willing the koura will be though. maybe you could hold it in a towel.

[MarkLB]

I think if it were a problem the Koura would remove it. When I had mine he'd clean himself fastidiously and they can reach every part of themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they don't mind it because it helps with camoflage in the wild.

[ninjafroglet]

Tis true Mark, but his antennae look like pipe cleaners. I guess I might just leave him to it after all.

but for the record its mostly black beard algae on his nippers, and some redder stuff on his antennae.

[purplecatfish]

use a syringe to squirt some flourish excel directly on the algae, it'll turn red and die

[Romeo]

Yeah, if it was annoying him he'd remove it ASAP. Anyways, he'll probably moult soon :].

[Caryl]

He might be using it to make a fashion statement

[ninjafroglet]

use a syringe to squirt some flourish excel directly on the algae, it'll turn red and die

I wasn't sure if this would kill him or not

Yeah, if it was annoying him he'd remove it ASAP. Anyways, he'll probably moult soon :].

I would hope so , but its only been about 3 months since I got him, and he's fully grown so I would have thought that he wouldn't moult as much as to when he was growing

[Stella]

hehehe love the image of a koura with pipe-cleaner antennae!

(photos please!)

I have had a few koura and they all have different personalities. This shows through in the self-grooming arena. Most are pretty fastidious, but some are a little less careful. When my current one was a wee lad his back was usually slightly green. He seems to have got older and wiser

Koura will eat that (if very hungry). Then again, they don't need to eat their dirt, they can just drop it.

I have Flourish-Exceled a tank with a koura in it, no harm done, but that is quite different to bathing in the stuff. They can be a bit sensitive to chemicals (I think Dixon found out the hard way that chlorine removers are toxic for them).

He probably will remove it if it annoys him, meantime Caryl might be right: perhaps he is already wearing next year's fashions?

[ninjafroglet]

Heheh, will post pics asap, having trouble posting pics atm

Disregard the post below, its me and Ryan trying to get the images to work, thats the only one that will work out of the ones I took. (It was him falling off of a piece of driftwood :lol: )

[oeminx]

[Stella]

:lol: I maintain that gravity has a stronger effect on koura the higher they go. They are quite sure-footed lower down but the higher they go they become more inclined to fall off!

And he is indeed a boy

[ninjafroglet]

Its so true

[ninjafroglet]

Gah, fed up at trying to figure out whats wrong with the pictures...

Here's the links to them instead:

Antennae- he kept moving them so some are a bit blurry :lol:

http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/9436/koura11si4.jpg

http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/1420/koura02pi4.jpg

Pincers

http://img75.imageshack.us/img75/2159/koura04yp8.jpg

Legs

http://img71.imageshack.us/img71/5116/koura12rc0.jpg

[purplecatfish]

:lol: Goatee and hairy knees :lol:

[Zev]

With Imageshack, do you get the option to post the IMG tags, they start with http: instead of the ones that start with HTTP: or

The IMG tags will allow the image to show in the post, rather than a link.

[ninjafroglet]

I take the direct link and use image tags around that to avoid the picture being a link to imageshack. That's not the problem I was having though, the problem was some thing to do with the forum not liking the size of my images.

[Zev]

All Images are links, we do not allow uploading to the boards.

The image size is 640 x 640px max

[ninjafroglet]

What I meant was that I used the direct link to the image provided by imageshack, and then used img brackets around that. I do this to avoid the picture opening a page on imageshack when you click it. All the images are 640x426 but have varying file sizes. Out of the five images I was trying to post only one worked, and that one was around 265kb. The ones that failed were 258kb, 259kb, 280kb, and 312kb. The thing that was confusing me was the one that worked wasn't the smallest file size, so the rest can't have failed because they were too big, despite the limit size being 128kb.

I'm bad at explaining things so it's likely that I won't have made any sense whatsoever.