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Paul_MTS

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I got these in at work yesterday and rather pleased with them so far.

I haven't attempted feeding yet but I'm guessing I'm not going to get them onto dead/frozen, so what do they take to the best?

I'm thinking along the lines of live bloodworm/daphnia/artemia, or maybe even small fish to get them started?

Would small crickets work at all?
 
if I saw these for sale now I'd get some cos I have a spare tank./ only ever seen them once and they are beautiful greens.

any pics?
 
Live mosquito larvae -- which stay close to the top of the water -- are good foods for small specimens, and from there you can perhaps try to wean them onto frozen food. I've no experience of these fish at all, but if I had them, I'd be using forceps to hand feed live mosquito larvae, and once they've learned that I'm serving the meals, I'd expect them to take wet frozen bloodworms. Earthworms would almost certainly be taken: most predators can't get enough of them, though you'd probably need to wiggle them in midwater to get the fish to strike.

That said, while Baensch reports them taking mosquito larvae, most reports of success with these fish (and they are NOT commonly kept) do seem to assume a ready supply of small fish, primarily livebearers.

I suspect floating live foods, like crickets, wouldn't be taken.

Cheers, Neale
 
if I saw these for sale now I'd get some cos I have a spare tank./ only ever seen them once and they are beautiful greens.

any pics?

Sorry no, I tried to take a quick pic with my phone but it wasn't happening! I'm a bit far from you but they are for sale at my work Seapets- Colchester. www.seapets.co.uk unfortunately we don't offer a courier service. The ones I have are a range of colours between grey and dark brown and all have beautiful patterns.

Thanks Neale, I often get live bearer babies in molly shipments so if I can't get them feeding on what I do have to hand over the weekend, I'll save the babies out of my delivery on Monday.

They range from 1-2" so some choices are out of the question at the moment.
 
River shrimp works just as well as live fish and i found they could not resist glass worms either. What kind of water are you keeping them in, they really need soft water with a pH below 7 and don't tend to last long in hard alkeline tapwater.
 
That is one problem I'm facing, My work tanks run on uncontrollable systems, so adjusting PH is hard.

But I have put fresh 'marsh root' in there which releases a lot of tannins and a couple of large java ferns to try and attempt to lower the PH.

Unfortunately being under staffed at the moment I didn't get a chance to try any foods today and being off tomorrow I dumped in some live bearer fry to make sure there getting some food.

A few of them started actively hunting immediately.
 
Repeat after me: pH doesn't matter.

Fish (mostly) couldn't care less what the pH is, provided it is within reasonable parameters and doesn't change all the time. The problems pH cause are through rapid changes, which affect the blood, and that in turn can make them sick.

What matters is the dissolved minerals in the water, i.e., whether it's hard or soft water. Soft water tends to have a low bacterial count, particularly when combined with low pH. Fish that need soft water and die in hard water tend to be stressed more by the bacteria than anything else. This is certainly true for things like Luciocephalus, wild-caught discus, Hemirhamphodon and so on. With at least some of these fish you need virtually mineral free water at pH 5-6, and that makes biological filtration untenable, and zeolite filtration is the preferred method for maintaining such fish reliably.

In any case, if these fish need soft water, I'd not fuss over the pH because acidic water with a high mineral content is of no particular value either way. Concentrate on lowering the hardness. Rainwater is a cheap, safe alternative to RO water and a heck of a lot more environmentally friendly. I use it all the time: all my tanks are 50:50 tap water, rainwater and the fish thrive. You might want to throw some carbon in the filter to remove any airborne pollution, and I do add water conditioner, but given pond fish don't die when it rains my assumption is it's pretty safe au naturel.

Cheers, Neale
 
You could also consider reverse osmosis, which provides absolutely pure water, I believe it's almost as pure as distillation (which is also an option if you have a still.) The problem is it's wasteful, it works by forcing impurities through a membrane. It's called reverse osmosis because normal osmosis is the movement of contaminants (usually ionic) from a solution of higher concentration to one of lower concentration. So it needs a lot of electricity and a lot of water. In most places it's just wasteful. In Australia it's positively antisocial because of the amount of water wasted, I've never actually seen an RO unit in action.
 
You could also consider reverse osmosis, which provides absolutely pure water, I believe it's almost as pure as distillation (which is also an option if you have a still.) The problem is it's wasteful, it works by forcing impurities through a membrane. It's called reverse osmosis because normal osmosis is the movement of contaminants (usually ionic) from a solution of higher concentration to one of lower concentration. So it needs a lot of electricity and a lot of water. In most places it's just wasteful. In Australia it's positively antisocial because of the amount of water wasted, I've never actually seen an RO unit in action.

If you read my posts carefully you would understand that the discussed fish are in a large system with other tanks and different types of fish in, so trying to lower the PH in stable of over 700 liters is near impossible to do in a safe way for the over fish in the system.

We have an RO unit at work running constantly, but I don't use the water in the fish house.
 
So it needs a lot of electricity and a lot of water. In most places it's just wasteful. In Australia it's positively antisocial because of the amount of water wasted, I've never actually seen an RO unit in action.

My unit doesn't utilise electricity and neither does any other that I have seen. Some people (with a mains pressure lower than 1-1.5 Bar) need booster pumps but that is certainly not the norm.

With regards to waste one can always capture the water and use it either for watering plants/gardens or for filling the cold water header tank and thus retaining the water for non-drinking use. And water is hardly wasted, it just gets treated and retruns to resevoirs from where it can be used again in water supplies. Another alternative is to utilise the water for FW fish systems.

And finally, whilst Thames water is losing over 894 million litres per day through leaking pipes (thats over 100 litres per person it serves when the average consumption for a person in the UK is only 150 litres per day) I shall not worry overly about my RO unit when it is on.
 
Lol, andy!

The size of the system was not mentioned anywhere specifically in this thread, so I didn't realise just how large it was. (I wish it was mine now.) So I guess RO isn't practical? I mentioned it because RO water is practically zero hardness, so if you could get enough of it it would be really good for softening the water, but it probably isn't practical for a setup that big.

How are they going anyway, got them eating?
 
Unfortunately none of them made it. I guess the nitrates in the old system was just too much for them.

They had started to feed on young live bearer and thought to be doing well for a week or so.

I want a new fish house!
 

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