splendidbetta

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The menu glitch is present in Opera too . Thanks for keeping AAQ running guys :(

:P Happy Birthday Michael! Have an awesome day! :P

Do the bounced email notifications contain any key terms such as the name or email address of the intended recipient? If so, maybe you could apply a spam filter that deletes or blocks them automatically.

If you've been taking any medications, they could end up in the tank via your urine, and unless they degrade rapidly to safe compounds before you add fish, they could be affected by them. It is also conceivable for your own naturally produced hormones and other chemicals produced by your own body and diet to be excreted in your urine. In high enough concentrations this could cause things like Demasculinizing of male fish due to exposure to estrogen.

From my reading and studying, detergent surfactants are just surfactants that are used in cleaning. Detergents and other surfactants all have the same property of being attracted to water on one end, and repelled by water on the other end, of the surfactant molecule. This property means that surfactants can be incorporated into cell membranes and can disrupt them, bursting the cell. So whether a surfactant is a detergent or not does not really matter in this case unless comparing two molecules with significantly different cell damaging activity. I do not know for certain what type of surfactant is used in cloudy ammonia, because unfortunately no manufacturer seems to think it's necessary to name that ingredient. However, it seems likely that chemicals such as Sodium lauryl sulfate or Ammonium lauryl sulfate are used, as these are commonly used in cleaning products. Notably, the first one is also used in biotechnology for degrading cell membranes to extract DNA. These two chemicals are apparently easily biodegraded (by microbes) http://www.heraproject.com/files/3-E-04-HE...%20web%20wd.pdf . It's possible that within the amount of time it takes to cycle a tank, with such small concentrations of surfactant added to the tank anyway, hardly any remaining surfactant is left to harm fish. If actual soaps are used in cloudy ammonia, and they are added to hard water, then they drop out of solution and may not be able to affect fish that way, unless ingested.

That's interesting to know Lisa. Everything I can find says modern cloudy ammonia contains soap. I also found a Material Safety Data Sheet to confirm the contents of cloudy ammonia: http://www.huntersproducts.com.au/docs/Clo...monia_061CF.PDF There are a couple possibilities: the concentration of soap in the ammonia solution plus tank water is too low to have noticeable health effects in fish, OR the concentration of soap in the water degrades over time due to physical/chemical factors (e.g. light and heat), or from being metabolised by microbes, so is safe for fish when cycling is completed. Did you only try this on brichardi Lisa? Could it affect other species?

You could try rinsing everything very well, allowing it to stay in the sun for a few days and turning opaque objects onto their other side halfway through, and re-rinsing. Porous objects like sponge or rocks may need to be discarded, or rinsed repeatedly, but I am not sure how well this would work. Boiling heatproof objects in the oven/microwave might be effective to degrade the detergent too, but I am not sure.

Cloudy ammonia is not safe to use because it contains detergent.

Welcome back Thomas :)

From what I could find, Water Lettuce, Pistia stratiotes, is legal in Victoria and SA. It looks and grows in a similar way to Salvinia. I once got some Pistia stratiotes from my local Bunnings gardening section.

Shutterbugs: http://ausaqua.net/forum/index.php?showforum=32

Lots of otherwise good fish shops sell stuff out of ignorance. If the fish are healthy and of good quality, and the products are good and reasonably priced, you can still shop there. Just don't rely on their advice, and independently learn more about things before you buy them :welcome:

At certain concentrations, clove oil is an irritant. If you don't want to see your betta thrashing around violently in the solution, do not try it at doses bellow that used for culling. (Unless you know the sedative dose and don't intend to kill your betta)

Fish do have arteries in their fins, albeit small ones. See the top of page 289. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=I7WhoP...nce&f=false I have found papers explicitly confirming the existence of sensory and motor nerves in fins. I have not been able to find anything about pain-receptors in fins. However, it makes no sense that such large and delicate parts of the anatomy would not have pain receptors. Fish fins often get damaged naturally, and they have the remarkable ability to heal and regenerate easily. I do not agree with trimming fins for aesthetic purposes, for example to reduce the length of the anal and dorsal fins to make them match a show standard. But I am fine with doing it to improve the fish's wellbeing :D

Yes, that's right If the pectoral length trait is partially/intermediately dominant, the length may be different between heterozygotes and homozygotes. The pectoral length trait might even be multifactorial, so it's possible that it will take more than 2 generations to see a noticeable increase in length. As far as naming them after me, that would be awesome However I think the Thai's have already done this, because I have seen HMs with abnormally large pectorals, but I do not know how they made them.

This is the Red Dragon HMPK male that I bought from Nina at one of the Melbourne Betta Gatherings Cheers :)

This is the red VT with the long pectoral fins that I am experimenting with, to learn about the genetics of long pectorals, as well as to try to develop the trait into HM and HMPK. He is currently in the spawn tank with this green Symmetrical Halfmoon Plakat female bred by Aquastar71: http://superbbettas.com/Breeding%20Stock%2...01/P2063330.jpg My hope is that the short anal fin and strong caudal fin traits that this female carries will compensate for the fact that her mate is a VT. I also suspect that developing HMs with long pectorals will be much easier using HMPK, since they are more robust, and the effect of the environment on their fin shape is much less. It will also be interesting to see if the HMPKs are able to express the long pectoral trait to any degree. I think long pectorals with a wider spread would look much better at about half the length of the VT's. Cheers :(

Welcome :)

That's a really nice setup :blink:

Awesome, thanks Do you need to change the water? I wouldn't think that's a good idea as it would remove the babies.

Thanks So only the first few layers are submerged? Do the upper layers stay moist?

Thanks for the pics Is the sponge porous enough for the worms to go through layers?

Sarcasm, Lissa? Anyway, I've changed my sig banner dimensions and made my avatar look nicer :)

Is my current sig acceptable?