Terry Ellacott

I've just watched a video called "Fever, fluids, food in acute infections" on Dr John Campbell channel on YouTube. He talks to Dr Stephen Hopton Cann who is a professor in public health at the University of British Columbia. Their discussion is about human responses to infections of viruses and bacteria but the responses are common to all animals including fish. One of the main defences against infection is to increase the body temperature because microorganisms do not cope well with temperature change. In warm blooded animals the body creates a fever, in cold blooded animals they move to warmer environments. A lot of the original research about infection control was done using fish. This might be why ill fish are often hanging around at the top of the water. I'm old enough to remember when fish medications were not easily available and many of the books at that time recommended increasing temperatures for sick fish. More countries are now limiting the availability of certain chemicals so it might be a good time to remind people of the use of increasing temperature to help treat sick fish.

I find it surprising that so much oxygen is moving to one point to be expelled rather than each leaf expelling a small amount. I understand that transpiration moves substances from roots to leaves, and gravity and osmosis move things from leaves to roots in terrestrial plants. I struggle to see how these can work underwater. Do you know what the "pump" is that moves things about in aquatic plants, it seems very efficient to move all the oxygen from each leaf to that one point, or is the oxygen just diffusing through all the water within the plant until it reaches a weak point.

I am watching my amazon sword plant pearling and it is producing a single steady stream of tiny bubbles. I started to wonder how the excess oxygen from twenty leaves gets to the one point where it forms the bubbles . That started me wondering how the nutrients from the substrate are transported from the roots to the leaves in aquatic plants which cannot use transpiration. I did try looking it up on Google but soon lost the will to live. If anyone can give me any information on how these things work I would be very grateful.

I keep a pestle and morter for grinding up food for fry, it has an advantage over a coffee grinder because it can be used on very small amounts of food. I do 3 or 4 pellets at a time and use a child's paint brush to brush the dust into the fry tank. If you need even finer food add a drop of water as you grind it and you will get dirty water which will feed the smallest fry.

Thanks again. I'm afraid the paper went a bit over my head. I started thinking about this because I wanted to know if it is possible to select for greater tolerance to cold. I have had a colony of Corydoras metae for 20 years and I am sure the fish in the colony now have a greater tolerance to high nitrates and pH crashes compared with the original fish I bought. If there are a range of enzymes in each species of fish it might be possible to select for greater cold tolerance. In twenty years time I might not have to buy that replacement heater.

Thanks for your reply. I had similar ideas about enzyme efficiency at different temperatures. I wondered if there is any information about enzymes that are common to tropical fish from different parts of the world and if there are different enzymes controlling the same pathways in cold water fish.

Can anyone tell me what stops working in tropical fish when the temperature drops ? Why do neon tetras die but goldfish survive ? Do all tropical species share a common metabolic pathway which is different to cold water fish? I've tried the Google search method but failed to find anything. Thanks Terry

If you collect the eggs individually, I just roll them off the glass or plants with my fingers, and spread them out in a container you can spot the infertile eggs before any fungus starts to grow out of them and infect other fertile eggs. The infertile eggs will start to turn white. This starts quite soon after they are laid and after a day the infertile ones will be completely white. In the picture you can see the infertile white eggs, clear eggs which are a day old and darker eggs which are more mature. I use an empty tube from a pen as a dip tube to remove the infertile eggs and to move around the good eggs so they are not touching each other. I find that by doing this it doesn't get to the point where fungus is a problem.

I do feed crushed snails to my fish and I have seen them eaten by angels, danios, guppies and barbs. My cherry shrimp will also eat them and if I feed too many, any left are eaten by snails, more food for tomorrow.

If anyone is interested in breeding fish I would highly recommend white worm and microworm cultures. I find that there is nothing better than white worms for getting fish to produce eggs and I find most fry that are big enough to eat brine shrimp will eat microworm. Once you have a starter culture you can have almost limitless quality food for almost nothing, mine are fed on white bread and oatmeal.

Not really but I have found that the suction cups on most aquarium products seem to have got much better in the last few years

The two methods with the filter foam take a bit of setting up but once they are made they require very little maintenance and will last longer than your filters will. Those in my photos are probably 15 years old. The filter floss is the easiest as long as you have the floss. It needs watching because it will become clogged and need rinsing. The floss has a bit of thickness to it which probably reduces the suction on the fry when they are at its surface. I think the stocking would not reduce the suction and although the fry would not be sucked into the filter they might be trapped against the stocking and damaged. You might be better off with a thick woolly sock instead of the stocking. When I clean my filters I usually tip the water from the filter into a white container and swill the sponge in it. When fry are small they can be sucked into the filter without being damaged and the sponge in the filter means they don't get to the impeller and get mashed. I've collected a lot of different fry this way. The biggest danger to the fry is when they are bigger and are damaged being sucked through the filter grill.

A spray bar is a tube that fits on the filter outlet, it has small holes along its lenght and a stop end. It breaks up the current coming out of the filter and by directing the holes towards the surface there is very little turbulence in the tank. When the fry are bigger just alter the angle of the flow and change the water movement in the tank. Most of the internal filters I have bought have come with a spray bar.

I've used internal filters with fry, here are three ways of covering the inlets. A spray bar aimed at the surface gets rid of too much turbulance. One is the bottom of a milk bottle cut and fitted with coarse foam, one is foam sown together with fishing line, both these are slow to clog. The third one is filter floss held in place with an elastic band, this can clog quite quickly but the fry will feed off it.

I've just checked and found that I bought six fish in 1998.I bred quite a lot of them for about eight years during which I selected the breeders mostly for big black fins.For the last ten years they have been left to get on with it and have gone down hill a bit.Over the last two weeks I've filled them full of white worms and collected about 30 eggs,I'll grow them on and pick the best to continue the colony.