Pets thread, Because someone needed to make one.

What species is that persevered bat?

Vesper bat
Pipistrelle Javaensis

You have an awesome house, Jørken.

Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to have any kind of pet at my appartment. A pity, as I'd love to have a leech, at least. Well, I still have my ants and dust mites.

thanks

I found some stuff online that says if you try a more extensive water change than normal Zebra Danios will try to breed: I did a more extensive water change due to I thought I would be away for the week-end (Tropical Storm 13 happened), the females GloFish don't seem receptive to breeding and the males have appeared to have formed rape-gangs from time-to-time.

Also it turns out it really important you pay attention to the sex of mollies when you get them because last night it would appears there was a winner with my two male mollies.

Ghost Shrimp seem to do really well in brackish water.

I'm giving it another week to see if my plants get established before I get some Red Claw Crabs.

I'm also planing to start some Brine Shrimp and Daphnia cultures. The Daphina culture will take more time to start up because I need to get the green water going and I have to get the starter culture through the mail (and it may be too hot for that for the next month).

I also have some sort of cray-fish that came with the ghost shrimp by accident (they're native to fresh, cold water but it seems to be doing fine in my warm water brackish tank) when I put an sinking algae tab in the tank grabs it and drags it off to one of its little lairs it dug for itself. There's going to be a territory battle when the RCC are added.

Me and my families other dog Rudolph, hes a little fatty.

WISE FWOM YOH GWAVE.

O.K. in my small brackish tank the Mollies have overtaken the tank so I got a Knight Goby to eat the fry; he doesn't do a very good job, he generally just chills out in his cave and eats the crabs' food pellets.
Turns out the styrofoam and quikrete method wasn't used alot in tanks with scavengers that had pinching claws; I occasionally have to do small patch jobs. But I have just about gotten a handle on the beach erosion issue.
Currently I have only one red claw crab left: two of the crabs decided to go for a scuttle outside the tank on a weekend I was gone and the other died during a failed molting due to complications caused by injuries sustainable in the territorial battles with the remaining red claw.
Not much luck with plants: even thought I put in some proper plant friendly substrate I'm likely going to need more light and if I want the Dwarf Hairgrass carpet a CO2 injector.

Speaking of plants and lighting in my larger tank I've just upgraded the lighting from 30 watts fluorescent to ~150 watts fluorescent (it's 46 gallons that is by no means overkill it might actually be a bit low) so I can put some potted (I don't want screw with the entire substrate due to the size) plants in. Now I can see how much algae there is better than before. I could have spent $300+ dollars for a proper premade lighting set-up but instead I spend about $80 and kludged something together from shop lights, round duct reducers, and foil tape.

Turns out my tetras were dying off due to neon tetra disease and once a tank has it it is very hard to get rid of (and would likely include killing off the fish that are proving resistant) so I've replaced them with White Mountain Cloud Minnows to see if they do better.

The daphnia culture was not successful; I'm going to need proper green water and lots of it if I'm going to try again. I've not much luck with my green water culture.

I never got the impression you needed to culture daphnia, my dad just grabbed some pond water for when he was growing some aquatic plants, daphnia have been in there like forever.

1) I don't have real easy access to pond.
2) A culture grown from lab bred daphnia is far less likely to introduce any new pathogens to the tank. I already have a nasty sporozoan outbreak likely from the local treated water supply (does not have much of a chlorine or chloramine content) or the pet store stock; so yeah...

We've had an aquarium ever since my fourth grade best friend convinced me to have one, so for more then 20 years now, seems to be a family thing, my grandmother had one, my father had one and now I do. We had most of the common fresh warm water species over the years, guppies, mollies, zebras, neons, tetras, etc.
In the good days managed to make some money selling guppies back to pet shops when I had a guppies that without fail gave birth to 30 babies every month. Managed to breed leopard zebras at one point, the offspring were ridiculous small and only about four survived out of 100, but it was fun feeding them liquid food.
The last batch of plague left us with only two gourami, which were alone in there for more then 2 years. When we decided to finally get new ones we went for an all gourami aquarium, since we knew from experience our fish are aggressive and are now so big they would murder a guppy in one ram. Worked well enough, no fish have died yet since they are all the same size, but turns out they are territorial, so now they are constantly fighting.
The interesting thing was watching the fish that is trying to gain dominance of the aquarium, slowly changing colour to match the colouration of biggest fish in there (and his only competition).
I would love to see these guys breed, as apparently they have a quite nice mating dance and the male literally squeezes the eggs out of the female, that would be nice to see, but we don't have the right conditions for that.

You sure its not mosquito larvae Out? those pop up alot and look superficially alot like daphnia, If not, damn you and your luck!

Have been bitten by mosquitoes once in all of 2012 (and this was when I was in Hong Kong), so pretty sure they're just daphnia.

This is my Dekay's brown snake, Lily. They're native here, and that's as big as she'll ever get.