Finbert

Do Betta's even need a heater or Filter. I have had them and never used either!! Maybe they need them and I didnt know and thats why they are no longer with me????

They don't /need/ them, but they sure seem to prefer them. Especially if the place you are keeping them is on the cool side, since they are tropical after all. (Before I knew about heaters, I kept mine at home without and lost them during a cold snap when my apt's heating took some time to catch up with the weather.)

You can get some very small submersible heaters that are OK in bowls as long as you can find something attractive to do with the cord. I had been using Red Sea Nano filters with my bettas, but I've switched to DIY sponge filters, and with the air on low it seems to work out OK.

The design for my sponge filters:

Some half-inch or so rigid plastic tubing, about the same length as the water is deep,

jammed into

A chunk of sponge (I used a generic refill for a smallish Aquaclear)

weighted down with some rocks.

Boggle at the hi-tekk awesomeness! (not!)

Yeah, they're up north fairly close to the cheapie movie theatre. It seems to me they're in a strip mall that faces a T intersection. I don't get up to the north side very often, but I was there when they were still getting set up and it looked like it was going to be gorgeous once they got their fishroom stocked.

Oh dear, I hope the dirt was at least tasty and the fence wasn't barbed wire.

My most memorable dirt-eating experience:

I was riding in my first and only show, in a jumping class for total beginners, on one of the horses I often rode for lessons. Prince Did Not Like brush jumps, which I only found out at the show, since we had never tackled one in lessons. Prince was not happy with me at all as far as I can tell, presumably because I made him go over the brush jumps and not around. Once we finished the course, I relaxed but Prince didn't. The small crowd applauded, and he went several feet up and several feet sideways all at once. I went flying into the arena wall and slid down it. He was a fairly small horse, so there wasn't too far to fall, and I wasn't hurt. As I was sitting there in the dirt, I heard someone laughing. It was my mom. She apologised later, but I guess in retrospect it was pretty funny.

Wow, she is just gorgeous - she may be a purebred AQH, but she looks like there's a good dose of Arabian in her to me. And for three years old, I'm really impressed by

(1) how agile she looks in the first pic - no teenage awkwardness going on at all there

(2) how calm and serious she looks in all the pics - I'm guessing not only does she have a great personality, but that her trainer is really, really good.

I've never mastered a flying change of lead either, but if she's good at turning on her backhand and forehand and you can get good at asking her to, you'll be able to open and close most gates without dismounting - an much more important skill for trail riding. When it comes to trail riding, are you thinking just going around exploring, or getting into endurance racing or competitive trail riding? (I know people who are into it and just love it.)

Oh, and off-topic, the female betta I picked up from you at the auction is doing great. I'm really enjoying her and so are my co-workers.

I read that axolotls do quite well in outdoor ponds, because they prefer cooler water. (After seeing them at the auction, I became smitten and did a bunch of reading) Not sure they'd be a good community critter though, because they have big wide hungry mouths.

I gave up fishkeeping and didn't come back for over a decade because a faulty heater kept cooking my fish. They are simply not something you want to mess with and get wrong, because the consequences are that everything dies. I'm super-paranoid about heaters; even brand-new ones I test in a bucket for 24 hours of temperature stability before they get anywhere near my tank. Broken ones also pack a pretty powerful zap, so if you do decide to plug it in and test it, be forewarned.

thanks for posting him! beautiful pics as always. And it seems that I'm wanting to borrow a lot of pics from here for desktop wallpaper.

My insurance is covered from "the sudden and accidental escape of water from a domestic water container" and describes a domestic water container as anything in your home that would normally be used to contain water. But it specifically excludes slow leaks.

Since I live in an apartment, I doubled my liability insurance just to be on the safe side.

I guess it also depends whether longfin is a dominant or recessive gene. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as high school biology, and there could be co-dominance and who knows what all else going on. Regardless, congrats on your babies!

Congratulations on your new babies!

Has he outgrown his hiding spots? Not sure what you can do now other than standard helping a sick fish stuff, but maybe a slightly bigger hidey-hole might help?

Gorgeous!

Next year I'm going to the show as well as the auction. It looks like I really missed out.

Any chance of getting some shots of BlackMumba's prizewinning male betta? pretty please?

There should be a pic of him somewhere on the forum, but I'll see if I can get some better ones on the weekend.

Maybe he's just prettier in person - you posted a bunch of photos but none of them looked quite like him.

Gorgeous!

Next year I'm going to the show as well as the auction. It looks like I really missed out.

Any chance of getting some shots of BlackMumba's prizewinning male betta? pretty please?

Wow, that's horrible for both of you. I'm so sorry. They were such beautiful fish. May your survivors and your new ones thrive and live to a ripe old age.

Thanks everybody, I guess I'll keep experimenting and hope I figure out what they like before I end up with lace plant lookalikes . And go through the old posts because there are lots fo tricks to try.

Zucchini seems to be everybody's guaranteed hit. Where do you find it this time of year? I didn't have plecos last fall, so I had no need for zuchs then, and now they're nowhere to be found. I also hate the idea of paying for something that you can't even give away when it's in season, but it's probably cheaper and easier to find than big, beautiful, established swords.

Also, do you feed the veggies cooked or raw? I tried giving some raw butternut squash and nobody touched it, not even the snails. (And I didn't try again with the cooked because (1) it was covered in brown sugar and olive oil, and (2) I ate it all up.)

Do you know if he's able to come out? For example, have you put out pleco delicacies and found them gone? If so, I think what I would do is tie a string around the log, put in a treat, and lie in wait. With luck, he'll be busy with the treat and you can pull the log out with the string. That might not frighten him as much as reaching in to pick it up, and he might not feel the need to hide.

Incidentally, how is he doing? You first tried to get him out quite a while ago!

Daaaayum they're pretties!

I got green beard algae growing on some rocks in my aquarium exactly as jvision and werner described (not intentionally at the time). It actually looks quite pretty, so I'm leaving it.

They interviewed the guy who discovered them on Quirks & Quarks, and he said something about guarding eggs and now having a bunch of fry. I don't know if it was one they were observing in the wild, or a captive specimen, but if it was the latter, that would mean they breed easily in captivity. Just a matter of time til you can have one?

"A fish that would rather crawl into crevices than swim, and that may be able to see in the same way that humans do, could represent an entirely unknown family of fishes, says a University of Washington fish expert.

The fish, sighted in Indonesian waters off Ambon Island, has tan- and peach-colored zebra-striping, and rippling folds of skin that obscure its fins, making it look like a glass sculpture that Dale Chihuly might have dreamed up. But far from being hard and brittle like glass, the bodies of these fist-sized fish are soft and pliable enough to slip and slide into narrow crevices of coral reefs. It’s probably part of the reason that they've typically gone unnoticed – until now."

from:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...w-nfh040208.php

At the rural school where my partner works, they had a mass die-off in one of their classroom aquariums that coincided with the beginning of the major melt. As far as I know, they're now using the same bottled water they drink and haven't had any losses since (which surprises me, because I'm surprised there's anything at all living in there, but that's a rant for some other time). Of course, I'm talking about a 20gal, so bottled water is practical for them.

Could it just be that the fry are sensitive to something in your well water that the other fish can handle?

The other thing about Excel and my vals - some of the older leaves did "melt" in the beginning, but it made enough new leaves fast enough that it was OK, and now that they've adjusted they're doing fine.

Not only did it work, he's gorgeous!