Topic: Official Dreamworks' Aquarium Draad Part Two
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ started this discussion 12 years ago #36,603
Sneak Peek!!Killer Lettuce !!iNo3FkiZx joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 2 hours later[^] [v] #497,862
Best draad on the fora.
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) replied with this 12 years ago, 23 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^] [v] #497,866
Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 7 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^] [v] #497,867
This is a Certified Quality Draad
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) replied with this 12 years ago, 1 week later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,166
Plants have arrived!
Anonymous D joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 2 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,167
pics pls
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) replied with this 12 years ago, 16 hours later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,247
I am catching fish!
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) double-posted this 12 years ago, 22 hours later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,351
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) triple-posted this 12 years ago, 1 minute later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,352
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) quadruple-posted this 12 years ago, 22 seconds later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,353
Anonymous E joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 21 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,354
@OP
Do you even fish?
Do you even fish?
Killer Lettuce !!iNo3FkiZx replied with this 12 years ago, 54 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,357
This draad changed my life.
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) replied with this 12 years ago, 2 hours later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,364
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) double-posted this 12 years ago, 23 seconds later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,365
Anonymous C replied with this 12 years ago, 43 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,377
Awesome!
Anonymous F joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 3 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,379
do the fishes like their new enhanced home?
squeegee joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 17 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,382
i'd add some blue dye to the water to balance all the green.
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) replied with this 12 years ago, 4 hours later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #501,424
@501,377 (C)
Thanks!
@501,379 (F)
They seem to. One of the fish jumped from the net when I was putting him back in and I guess he suffered some injury to his swim bladder because he could not swim straight up for a few hours though he was fine the next day.
Thanks!
@501,379 (F)
They seem to. One of the fish jumped from the net when I was putting him back in and I guess he suffered some injury to his swim bladder because he could not swim straight up for a few hours though he was fine the next day.
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) double-posted this 12 years ago, 6 days later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #502,521
eggciting!!Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #502,524
Dw !jdTkvovFCQ (OP) replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #502,525
Pangio (Acanthophthalmus) kuhlii. (Kuhli Loach). For tiresome technical reasons, since 1993 we've been meant to get used to referring to this species as Pangio. I'll admit "Acanthophthalmus" was a mouthful, but at least it did mean "spiny-eye!". By the way, it's kuhlii not kuhli, mostly because it was originally published so, but also because if Kuhl's name were latinized it would be Kuhlius (even Culius) not Kuhlus.
Guru-ichthyologist Maurice Kottelat prefers to call these Eel-loaches, for the species that Achille_Valenciennes described and named in 1846 from drawings prepared in Java by the German naturalist Heinrich Kuhl and forwarded to Leiden, is just one of a complex of similar species. The Pangio complex of overlapping species, "sub-species" — whatever that might genuinely mean nowadays — and populations is a large one. Recent (2011) phylogeny (by Bohlen, Slechtova and Tan in Molecular Phylogenetics), based on molecular genetic data, group the many species of Pangio into three lines of descent, originating some 29 to 33 million years ago, and include the all-dark P. oblonga from India in the kuhlii group.
Look closely at your P. kuhlii: if it has a barbel on its lower lip, it's not P. kuhlii but one of the P. shelfordi species group, which all have dark brown to black banding on a warm pinkish to yellow body color.
Pangio kuhlii has a wide distribution in the Malay Peninsula to southern Thailand, in northeastern drainages of Sumatra, in western Java (though with unusual markings) and in northwestern Borneo (in Sarawak and in Kalimantan Timur and Kalimantan Barat); this is a Sundaland distribution, in regions that were all linked in the freshwater peat swampland of the Sunda Shelf, when sea levels dropped during the Ice Age and the South China Sea retreated northward. Various other Pangio species that we don't often see in aquaria range farther northwest through Thailand and Burma (2 species) into northern India (3 species) and northeast to southern China. Each species has a preferred habitat, ranging from cooler fast-running upland streams to still lowland wetlands.
You'll easily tell mature males from females by their cylindrical shape; females are higher through the midsection even when they're not full of eggs. In the males, the second ray of the pectoral fins is supposed to be thickened: I could never see this myself, but Gunther Sterba's Freshwater Fishes of the World (1967) mentioned it, and Maurice Kottelat and Kelvin Lim confirmed it, in their review of Pangio for Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, 1993; they give a morphological key for identifying the easily-confused Malayan species.
Maintaining Pangio kuhli in a species tank purposively set up just to suit them, without competition, alarms or distraction of other fishes, is something it's taken many decades for me to arrive at. I've never had so much pleasure as from my dozen maintained in a 10-gallon tank, that is dimly lit with Innovative Marine's Skkye LED fixture on a gooseneck arm that's suction-cupped to the rear glass and holds the horizontal fixture about 4 inches above the water surface; it has six 1-watt LEDs rated a modest 720 lumens in total and provides a warm (6500K) pool of light that leaves the tank's outer corners quite dim. The gravel's scale and color complement the loaches' blotchy stripes and render them pleasantly inconspicuous but precludes any serious digging. Instead litter of small dry Ketapang leaves, about three deep. creates shadowy galleries that offer overhead cover for the loaches, with edges open to my view. I improve this view by snipping leaves along the midrib and pressing the cut edges against the front pane of glass. Roots covered with dense masses of Anubias bateri nana and a small clump of Bolbitis attached to a bit of wood (making it easily movable) provide plenty of dark tangle and get by, slowly, with low light. The loaches easily negociate the tight spaces among Anubias' stiff leaves and stems. Their only companions are Neocaridina shrimp (the two populations blissfully ignore one another), and my ubiquitous Malayan Trumpet Snails. A sponge pre-filter keeps shrimp out of the h.o.t. filter and, hopefully, will one day exclude juvenile Pangio kuhli.
Try keeping Kuhli Loaches for a few months each year at a slightly cooler temperature, 70° to 75°F. They'll appreciate the greater dissolved oxygen at the lower temperatures. But high temperatures, 82° to 85°, can trigger some excited pre-spawning behavior.
A slice of boiled zucchini will be eagerly shared; I give my gang twenty-four hours to round up every last scrap before giving them a new slice.
Breeding. Kuhli Loaches are the tropical loaches that have reproduced most often in captivity: experiments by the Thai Department of Fisheries reported success in commercial breeding in 1998. For years no hobby aquarists ever seemed to catch them doing it. They bred for Al Castro in soft water with a pH ranging 6.3 to 6.8. Castro had five spawnings that produced young. Though he claimed to have learned little from the events, he noted that the greenish adhesive eggs were scattered through plants, especially Water Sprite. Though Pangio will snack on their own eggs, Al Castro's fry pretty much raised themselves undisturbed, in a natural planted aquarium with plentiful sub-microscopic life. Al never saw any sign of a bubblenest, which has sometimes been credited to Kuhli Loaches. His account was published in Aquarium Fish. Mike Hellweg reports spawning behavior in an article "Are you ready for the challenge of breeding the Kuhli Loach?" archived at FishChannel. The excited paired swimming that leads to egg release, in this case right in a community tank, is recorded in "kaiser402"'s brief video on YouTube, and in 2008 "la Tamarind" caught video of the tiniest Kuhli Loach fry after spawning activity that happened during a hot spell, with aquarium temperatures reaching 30oC. My Pangio, just coming to maturity, are inspired every few months to frenzied gang-swimming with some paired swimming, swarming up one corner and across their tank, but eggs haven't appeared yet.
In each reported case of a surprise Kuhli spawning, the crucial elements seem to be the security and privacy offered by constricted cave-like openings and the company afforded by a fairly large colony. You wouldn't want to keep any Pangio loaches alone anyway, not once you've seen how tactile and sociable they are. Gregarious. These are crepuscular fishes, but they lose their twilight habits if you give them plenty of opportunities to hide in tight shadowy spaces. Then they'll drape themselves like tree snakes in dense plant growth.
Kuhli Loaches would rather live in an undergravel filter than almost any more picturesque set-up you can contrive, and I've known them to disappear for years, to be forgotten, and to reappear, wriggling with alarm, only when the undergravel filter was being siphoned or the tank was being taken down.
Guru-ichthyologist Maurice Kottelat prefers to call these Eel-loaches, for the species that Achille_Valenciennes described and named in 1846 from drawings prepared in Java by the German naturalist Heinrich Kuhl and forwarded to Leiden, is just one of a complex of similar species. The Pangio complex of overlapping species, "sub-species" — whatever that might genuinely mean nowadays — and populations is a large one. Recent (2011) phylogeny (by Bohlen, Slechtova and Tan in Molecular Phylogenetics), based on molecular genetic data, group the many species of Pangio into three lines of descent, originating some 29 to 33 million years ago, and include the all-dark P. oblonga from India in the kuhlii group.
Look closely at your P. kuhlii: if it has a barbel on its lower lip, it's not P. kuhlii but one of the P. shelfordi species group, which all have dark brown to black banding on a warm pinkish to yellow body color.
Pangio kuhlii has a wide distribution in the Malay Peninsula to southern Thailand, in northeastern drainages of Sumatra, in western Java (though with unusual markings) and in northwestern Borneo (in Sarawak and in Kalimantan Timur and Kalimantan Barat); this is a Sundaland distribution, in regions that were all linked in the freshwater peat swampland of the Sunda Shelf, when sea levels dropped during the Ice Age and the South China Sea retreated northward. Various other Pangio species that we don't often see in aquaria range farther northwest through Thailand and Burma (2 species) into northern India (3 species) and northeast to southern China. Each species has a preferred habitat, ranging from cooler fast-running upland streams to still lowland wetlands.
You'll easily tell mature males from females by their cylindrical shape; females are higher through the midsection even when they're not full of eggs. In the males, the second ray of the pectoral fins is supposed to be thickened: I could never see this myself, but Gunther Sterba's Freshwater Fishes of the World (1967) mentioned it, and Maurice Kottelat and Kelvin Lim confirmed it, in their review of Pangio for Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, 1993; they give a morphological key for identifying the easily-confused Malayan species.
Maintaining Pangio kuhli in a species tank purposively set up just to suit them, without competition, alarms or distraction of other fishes, is something it's taken many decades for me to arrive at. I've never had so much pleasure as from my dozen maintained in a 10-gallon tank, that is dimly lit with Innovative Marine's Skkye LED fixture on a gooseneck arm that's suction-cupped to the rear glass and holds the horizontal fixture about 4 inches above the water surface; it has six 1-watt LEDs rated a modest 720 lumens in total and provides a warm (6500K) pool of light that leaves the tank's outer corners quite dim. The gravel's scale and color complement the loaches' blotchy stripes and render them pleasantly inconspicuous but precludes any serious digging. Instead litter of small dry Ketapang leaves, about three deep. creates shadowy galleries that offer overhead cover for the loaches, with edges open to my view. I improve this view by snipping leaves along the midrib and pressing the cut edges against the front pane of glass. Roots covered with dense masses of Anubias bateri nana and a small clump of Bolbitis attached to a bit of wood (making it easily movable) provide plenty of dark tangle and get by, slowly, with low light. The loaches easily negociate the tight spaces among Anubias' stiff leaves and stems. Their only companions are Neocaridina shrimp (the two populations blissfully ignore one another), and my ubiquitous Malayan Trumpet Snails. A sponge pre-filter keeps shrimp out of the h.o.t. filter and, hopefully, will one day exclude juvenile Pangio kuhli.
Try keeping Kuhli Loaches for a few months each year at a slightly cooler temperature, 70° to 75°F. They'll appreciate the greater dissolved oxygen at the lower temperatures. But high temperatures, 82° to 85°, can trigger some excited pre-spawning behavior.
A slice of boiled zucchini will be eagerly shared; I give my gang twenty-four hours to round up every last scrap before giving them a new slice.
Breeding. Kuhli Loaches are the tropical loaches that have reproduced most often in captivity: experiments by the Thai Department of Fisheries reported success in commercial breeding in 1998. For years no hobby aquarists ever seemed to catch them doing it. They bred for Al Castro in soft water with a pH ranging 6.3 to 6.8. Castro had five spawnings that produced young. Though he claimed to have learned little from the events, he noted that the greenish adhesive eggs were scattered through plants, especially Water Sprite. Though Pangio will snack on their own eggs, Al Castro's fry pretty much raised themselves undisturbed, in a natural planted aquarium with plentiful sub-microscopic life. Al never saw any sign of a bubblenest, which has sometimes been credited to Kuhli Loaches. His account was published in Aquarium Fish. Mike Hellweg reports spawning behavior in an article "Are you ready for the challenge of breeding the Kuhli Loach?" archived at FishChannel. The excited paired swimming that leads to egg release, in this case right in a community tank, is recorded in "kaiser402"'s brief video on YouTube, and in 2008 "la Tamarind" caught video of the tiniest Kuhli Loach fry after spawning activity that happened during a hot spell, with aquarium temperatures reaching 30oC. My Pangio, just coming to maturity, are inspired every few months to frenzied gang-swimming with some paired swimming, swarming up one corner and across their tank, but eggs haven't appeared yet.
In each reported case of a surprise Kuhli spawning, the crucial elements seem to be the security and privacy offered by constricted cave-like openings and the company afforded by a fairly large colony. You wouldn't want to keep any Pangio loaches alone anyway, not once you've seen how tactile and sociable they are. Gregarious. These are crepuscular fishes, but they lose their twilight habits if you give them plenty of opportunities to hide in tight shadowy spaces. Then they'll drape themselves like tree snakes in dense plant growth.
Kuhli Loaches would rather live in an undergravel filter than almost any more picturesque set-up you can contrive, and I've known them to disappear for years, to be forgotten, and to reappear, wriggling with alarm, only when the undergravel filter was being siphoned or the tank was being taken down.