Re: [Killietalk] list problems

[Wright Huntley <whuntley at inkmkr_com>]

Becky,

I tend to agree with your comments on the current state of the AKA site. 
In my opinion, such a site should be as simple, direct, and as 
unequivocal as the cooking directions on a frozen-food package.

The site itself can be as byzantine as the authors wish, but navigation 
should not be a stumbling block, and newbies should never encounter a 
bewildering list of undefined and vague choices when three or four clear 
ones are all that is needed to get them going in the right direction.

That said, let's get to your important question.

Becky Schultz wrote:
> 
> Just my two cents worth. So, if anybody would like to
> tell me what the heck I am supposed to do with the N.
> ravovii eggs I bought several weeks ago, I'm listening.

Thw first thing you need to do is the most difficult for newbies. 
Finding eggs in peat, and evaluating their level of development is quite 
difficult without a hands-on mentor to get you started. After you have 
done it a few times, you wonder why it was so hard to do the first time.

Eggs, after developing somewhat, may get to be nearly peat colored and 
are darkened internally. They can be very difficult to find without the 
right approach. New eggs are much easier, as they are amber or clear and 
show up easily in a white-bottom bowl or other container that lets light 
shine through them.

I use an intense (100W) halogen reading lamp, shining at about 45 
degrees from peat shallowly spread in a white bowl. My eye is opposite, 
so reflection from the bowl surface is glaring in my face. Sunlight 
works even better, and all of us can afford that (unless we are Matt K. 
living in the perpetual gloom of the Pacific NW :-)).

I use a chopstick or blunt tweezers to slide a bit of the peat at a time 
from one side of the bowl to the other, looking for the perfectly round 
little eggs. They are between about 1/16 and 1/8" in diameter, and once 
your eye is trained to spot the perfect little spheres, they are easy to 
distinguish from the longer oval egg-shaped seeds that happen in most 
sphagnum peat.

Why go to all this trouble?

Eggs bought and shipped have most uncertain gestation times, and a good 
hatch depends on being able to dunk the peat in water at the optimum 
time. Many of us learn to time the hatch on eggs we have kept in our 
fishroom, and don't bother to search the peat. Unfortunately the 
pressure and temperature changes of shipping makes it impossible to 
predict the right time. Too early and no hatch, and too late may be a 
bunch of belly-sliders or wildly skewed sex ratio (or, again, no hatch).

When is the time right?

When the eggs start to show eyes, a gold ring eventually surrounds the 
pupil of each eye. When more than 2/3 of the eggs you can find show that 
solid ring, it is probably about time, and much further delay can spell 
trouble.

That is the time to be sure your brine-shrimp hatchery is working 
reliably, for you need to start a batch about a day before the RAC eggs 
are dunked. You should also have some back-up infusoria so the smaller 
babies get a head start, and don't get gobbled up by the larger (often 
all male) babies.

Hatching?

I like to dunk the peat in fairly-cold (45-55F) soft water, about an 
inch or so deep in a clear container. Add a pinch of salt (Well, a 
tablespoon per 5G) to minimize chances of velvet. If you are using 
distilled or RO water, be sure the salt is something like Coralife or 
Instant Ocean, for they contain other essential electrolytes. In harder 
water, plain table salt is fine if it doesn't contain silicates to 
prevent clogging. The cheap grocery-store brands that use sodium 
ferrocyanide (aka yellow prussiate of soda) are fine, but the silica gel 
is like powdered glass and seems to do a number on fish gills. [This 
gave rise to the persistent myth that the iodides in iodized salt are 
harmful -- lots of fish thyroid disease around because folks believe 
that myth!]

I toss a wad of Java Moss in the hatch water, and put a drop or two of 
Liquifry #1 on it to induce an infusoria bloom. This only works well if 
you do not use Amquel, Prime, or one of the other formaldehyde-like 
dechloraminators. They tend to kill off rotifers, paramecia, etc. A 
grain-of-rice sized piece of hard-boiled egg yolk blended into a tsp. of 
water is a good substitute if you cannot find the Liquifry, locally.

I double the volume of the hatch water, daily, using my tap water 
(carbon filtered or otherwise freed of chlorine/chloramine/ammonium). 
This acclimates the babies to whatever my local water may be.

If there are no babies visible after 24 hours, redry the peat between 
paper towels or newspaper to just dark, and not sopping wet, and try 
again in about 2-3 weeks.

Get the babies off the peat as soon as possible. I prepare a grow-out 
container with water that roughly matches the temp. and tds of the hatch 
water. By preparing it ahead, and having a lot of Java Moss in it, you 
can be pretty sure of an ample supply of microfoods to keep them going 
between bbs feedings.

I usually pour off some of the hatch water with some of the babies. Most 
of them dive into the peat at the smallest disturbance, so those you 
need to suck out with a baby medicine dropper o/e. Watching through the 
side of the clear container, you can start disturbing the peat at one 
end, with the dropper tip, and work your way across. As you kick babies 
up out of the peat, suck them up and transfer to the growout container. 
[Epiplatys and other surface fish may be easier to collect with a 
soup-spoon, like the flat-bottom ones from a Chinese restaurant.]

Don't worry about getting a little peat with the babies, but basically 
you want a clean bottom in your grow-out tank, so you can vacuum out any 
dead bbs, every day. Leaving them in the tank is a sure way to have all 
the babies suddenly die from an outbreak of Velvet Disease. [Trick for 
vacuuming grow-out tanks: Put the end of your siphon in a fine enough 
net to exclude babies but allow dead bbs to be sucked through.] I use 
ramshorn snails in all my baby tanks, because I'm not that diligent 
about the cleanup work. They do a good job keeping the water clean, and 
their liquid waste is great infusoria food. Their solid waste is 
easy-to-vacuum inert pellets.

Ken Simolo, our list/web guru, just made my point about needing more 
clarity at the web site. Follow his link trail, and you can get much 
better info than I have just given, from much more expert folks. What 
Ken and Barry sometimes miss is that the links and scrolling advice he 
gave are far, far from obvious and easy for every new visitor.

Every single time I visit the AKA web site, I am utterly baffled by the 
way to find what I want. I don't think "The Basics" or "The Fish" give 
any clue whatsoever to a newby that there even *is* a "Beginner's Guide" 
much less that someone cannot use its table of contents, and has to 
scroll forever, in hopes of finding a needed answer.

Every link title should be unmistakable in purpose, and utterly clear as 
to where it leads. Ambiguous, over-general titles like "The Basics" or 
"The Fish" are clear examples of how to hopelessly confuse the newcomer. 
Unless you already know the site, they are simply noise.

Just recently, I tried to enter the forum by using the AKA title page. I 
found it hopeless, and had to go to the site map and sort through all 
the listings just to find how to read the forum. I'm certain that it is 
quite obvious to Ken and Barry just how to get there. Believe me it is 
not that obvious to everyone -- even though it should be.

Remember, make it idiot-proof and they'll invent a better idiot! :-)

Hope this helps, Becky.

Wright


-- 
Wright Huntley - Rt. 001 Box K36, Bishop CA 93514 - whuntley at verizon_net 
  760 937-2276 (cell) 760 874-2000 (CA) or 941 866-0500 (FL).

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
Ansel Adams

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