Leaderboard

Hi all I'm thinking about organising a group buy of poret filter foam. From what I've heard it is the best stuff available but it is not cheap and the only place I know of the get it is from a place in NZ. Of course the difficulty would be having to ship large pieces of foam again from Adelaide here which would add to the cost but it might still work out better. http://fish2water.co.nz/poret-filter-foam.php Does anyone know a local supplier perhaps? [emoji111] [emoji173] Will

Nice job. I love seeing diy woodwork. I recently made this for the wife

I'm to lazy to quote :) So: Reason for cutting crust is i found they do not eat it as readily as the yeast in the white bread itself, and it take a longer time to break down. Crusty mess, like mine and your kids make :) The yeast is the key part of the bread they eat, but no I havent tried or bothered since we always have bread in the house. I have a friend who has used live yeast with results that'll blow your mind haha. Thats just expensive and too much effort though :) I always keep 2-3 cultures of any given live food, it WILL crash at some point. I prefer to refeed, you can usually get away with refeeding once, sometimes twice, before you have to restart the microworm culture. Manure for media? That sounds pretty filthy... I've heard of coconut fibres being used with great success, me I prefer soil-less. Much less effort, smell and way cleaner. All you need is a take away container (or shoe box) and some scourer pads. I feed grindals with farex branded rice cereal. Lasts a while, and is cheap as chips. People feed worms all sorts of stuff like cat/dog food, etc. All that just sounds too smelly for me :) We were in an apartment until recently and my wife has the nose of a i dont even know what, but she picks that smell up a mile away. And i like my balls no busted, so I prefer the less smelly way. @jayc will do a write up as soon as i get some time, most likely this weekend :) Cultures are due for delivery today, so I will start taking photos as I go.

Grindals are coming from a friend, they are on peat moss. I will try to move them over to a soil-less culture if I can clean them up... My first ever source of grindals came with like 5 worms... Took over a month to just get some visible worms, it was painful. Setting up cultures after that was much faster because I used much more worms, or even a whole scourer pad that I was using as their medium. So 1-2 weeks before they were "mature" enough to collect a chunk of worms daily. Grindals shouldn't really have a bad smell unless culture is crashing IMO, you will notice worms will try to escape the box in this case too. I use scourer pads, 3 stack high, worms in middle, top to hold moisture, bottom pad is soaked to provide moisture. Food between middle and top layer, small piece of plastic grid over food so they eat food and climb over this, all you have to do is shake this grid into a tank to feed :) Short version of it anyway. You need to mist them for a while to keep moisture in, they love moisture. Only feed enough to be eaten in 24 hours or so to prevent mold. Paramecium is easy, how I do it is 1.25 or 2L bottles filled with tank water (no chemicals, etc), add paramecium, add a pinch of powdered skim milk (i've used full cream, skim, etc milk in the past, and this works just as good but produces a layer of protein on the top which tends to stink a bit, and have to avoid it when collecting for a feed), shake bottle a bit and your done. The skim feeds bacteria, which the paramecium feed on. I found if you mix other things into the culture you end up with infusoria of all kinds rather than tiny paramecium (which is what I wanted myself). You can actually let micro worm cultures dry out (they lay eggs) and store them somewhere for a while, when you wet them again they will hatch and restart the culture :) I use the bread and water method for micro worms. Cut crust off sliced bread (some people cut it up, i dont bother), wet it udner the tap enough to be moist similar to battering fish, put wet bread in takeaway container 1-2 layers high. Put worms in, sprinkle some dry bakers yeast over them and your done. I find the bakers yeast helps get htem going faster, and they feed on the bread. Cultures need refeeding like once a week or so. I'll do a proper write up for all 3 once I get my new starter culture if there is enough interest in this being an article or something?

I agree. For me it was like: 'this must be it!' but we can't be sure at all unless determent with a microscope. So when I have more information and elaborated my observations, I want to check with other people. Like when someone got the same trouble, then go to them with my microscope en observe some sick shrimp. Only when I find more people with this parasite, then it could be a clue. I agree there are a thousand more disease that have the same symptoms like this. If you have a microscope yourself, this is how I do it: I catch a slow shrimp and put in on the glass plate. I make sure there is very little water on the plate, just enough to make sure the antennas are not dry. I don't use a cover plate. Too much water makes the shrimp able to move. Then I observe the antenna's from top till the base of the head. Most of the time, closer to the head you will see more parasites. I observe no more then a few minutes and then release the shrimp back into the tank. Thank you all for your input, it got me thinking. Indeed I'm treating them with external approach. Since I hoped that this also came into the shrimp body. But it's much smarter to find something that they will eat and is absorbed into the shrimp body. Something that will harm the parasites and not the shrimp. I will start to focus on this.