cichlidkid

im gonna say synspilum

hey jay

not quite dead, Ive been around, here and there. I spent a bunch of time down in australia and now i guess im back, there should be a party.

what did I miss?

nice fish, let me know if your gonna sell them :tongue:

well here they are:

haha woops it didnt work, Ill try again tommorow

broke myself reall bad so I havent been able to get down there, I hope he isnt gone.

going tommorow to get him

tough break man

btw shoot me over the code thing for the NWA in your sig

hey canucklehead (chris right?) did you buy those escondido from me at westhills?

silly african people.

agression varies a huge amount with the growth of the cichlid (neo's anyway) for example, in my experience umbies and dovii will get their @ss kicked by a simular sized convict when babies but at 5 inches or so the convict is toast. to my knowledge no person on this forum has seen a fully grown blue dempsey so nobody really has a clue how agresssive they are (although generaly people say they are a bit more timid than the regular version) even though they arent the "crazy cichlids" everyone seems to think I have only seen a few that are as/less docile than the average firemouth (that being like a blue jack being as/less agressive as a firemouth) And I have never seen one that could stand up to a salvini as they get the guapote chomps/attitude.

you really halfto think what you want: moderatly peacefull (like with severums/festivums) , semi agressive like firemouths/jack dempsey/parrots

if I was going to do it again I would go with some smaller gymnogeophagus (sp?) a few diadema and some severums

sorry, this probably doesnt make sense. I broke my wrist and im pretty wacked out on codine

good to know, thanks rudy

by the way, steve wont touch NLS do you think I could hide them in the shrimp?

I did "forget it and move on" thats why I MOVED ON to some other fish (like my ray and my piranha's) so I FORGOT to clean out the hoses.

I just thought that something may have festered or something.

oh btw I dont believe the hoses killed them thats cinima sh*t. infact I do belive I saw that movie, wasnt it "when canister hoses strike back"?

dont worry tim, she's on the shrimp, I feed it to her twice a day and before I go to school I drop in a chunk of bloodworms for her to graise on.

damn thing eats way better than I do.

if it occers over time why did it just show up and kill my festae's (when the tank was running and like 15x per hour

its been sitting there for.... um like 2 months give or take?

im just paranoid cause I lost my 2 favorite most exp*nisve fish to this, and I dont want it to happen again.

when my festaes died I went though a complete overhaul in my tank, everything was stripped down, washed with hot (sometimes boiling) water, rinsed with vinager and then washed again.

gravel was changed out for sand, all filter media was replaced and the aquaclears where scrubbed down (and steamed)

now I have my ray in the tank and she is doing great, a bit on the scrawney side as she wont touch earthworms (isnt that wierd?) but happy and healthy none the less.

there was only one thing that I missed in my meticulus sterilization.

the fluval hoses

I even left the hoses dangling off the tank (attatched to the aqua-stop or whatever its called) these hoses have not had water running through them since the strip-down but they have deffenently had humidity and probably some water sitting in them due to the aqua-stop.

so anyway I finaly got my new impeller, put it in and seter up, compleatly forgeting about the hoses.

as soon as it started I knew I was in sh*t. death started pouring out of the hoses, (old bits of slime coat stuff that looks like lemonade pulp) this stuff was floating all around just as the festaes where on their way out.

by the time I got to the right cord the water was coming out clear. so I left it, I figure the damage has already been done.

I did a 50%water change and added 9 tbs of salt.

what else can I do? normaly I would throw a fu*ckload of preventative crap in but those kinds of meds would probably kill the ray even faster than this sickness.

excelent fish as always Jay

Buy a small tooth brush for cleaning works good for the impeller well to.

or just use someone else's

have you got any other tanks? using water/some ( in the filter) and a ac 500 that was from my 110. I had the water good enough (and most importantly stable enough) for a retic ray in 2.5 days.

if you take stuff from established tanks it makes it allot easier and faster. live plants seem to really help as well.

mine seems to love my 120w, I think there is a fair bit of current. im running 2 ac500's and a fluval 404

she looks so much like her mom at that size :cry:

same thing as what happend to my festaes is happening again this time in one of my tanks in the basement, the fins are turning silver and the rest of the body has incredible color.

what the hell is happening? this is the second F*#king second time, both times it has hit as fast as lightning. Im pissed off and Id like some answers

thanks,

sometimes I add prime, mostly its just that aqua-plus stuff, I have been watching the ammonia and nitrate every day since last week and it all checks out.

for substrate im using sand, playsand I think.

and for tankmates she is with one small gold nugget pleco, I know your not usualy supposedto put them together but they get allong great, the pleco just sits on a peice of wood looking pretty and doesnt bother the ray at all.

yea the mucus stuff is arround the spine, also she seems to have places where sand sticks to her more that other places.

I have a few concernes about my little motoro, stevie.

latly it looks like she has a mucusish skin kind of thing peeling off her tail, it hapens every few days and after the skinish thing peels off her tail looks great and normal, she eats great, she is nice and plump and she motors about all over the tank, I usualy do 2 water changes a week and I have 2 ac 500's and a fluval on the tank (120w).

also she has a couple nicks, really small ones about the size of a pen tip out of her disc, any chance of those healing?

well good news for you, in case you havent heard we at petland are doing a rapps order.

thanks again mark

we have a nice sized group of exos at westhills petland