yikai

lai lai more help lai!

please note that the isopod will not stick to the fish for ever and wait for you to slowly trap the fish. once it has had its fill of blood it will detach. or worse, it will detach when the fish swims into areas that may be too bright for it. so i suggest you catch it out ASAP and not wait for the mandarin to go to sleep or what not. get a glass bottle, put live brine shrimps, and let the mandarin go in. or find other methods of trapping. mandarins are not that difficult to catch. easy to trap.

yup no problem bro. clownfishes respond very well to FW dips. but not mandarins cheers!!

all wrong lol. actually dunnid to give scientific name lah. i will know what you're referring to. just that sometimes 1 common name can mean so many different fish.

what makes you so sure its a wrasse!! haha not saying it is or isnt though.

wrong. not mystery wrasse. i wont give something that easy lah! haha ;p one of my dream fishes.

the nitrate 40ppm is fine. for a FOWLR, 40 ppm is no problem. for a reef tank, its rather high but nothing to worry about. don't need to do massive water change. slowly do smaller changes and bring it down. the other bothering thing is the PO4. are u running a reef tank? if so, get the PO4 down quickly. if FOWLR, dont need to worry so much. ammonia is not zero? your ammonia should not be anything except zero. try to test again using another test kit. if ammonia is present it means that the biological system isnt fast enough break ammonia down into nitrate and nitrite radicals. dose bacteria and do WC. your main prority now is to get the ammonia to 0, reduce the PO4. NO3 can deal slowly for now, don't panic. you can either change water by getting NSW from iwarna or get your own salt mix. i suggest getting NSW instead of salt mix now since you're doing such large scale WC and salt mix is too expensive and needs time to settle down. Get a second hand pump and attach a hose to it and drain out the water from the sump tank. any pump will do, cheap 1 is best. i use my chiller's eheim to do the job. pump the water out from the sump into a pail and dispose. then replace with NSW. WC slowly. start with around 40-50%? then slowly reduce until you see good results. use a good reliable test kit like salifert please. good luck!

exact name please! a scientific name will be best if you can find haha.

Prize will be 2 polyps of these!

something easy today.

i have had 2 parasitic isopods on my jawfish before. dam sick when you freshwater dip. especially when the pod is IN THE MOUTH of the jawfish. you will see the pod crawl out of the mouth like some sick alien movie... they dont tolerate freshwater dips and they go nuts.

like i've said many times. moderators cannot control what the thread starter states in the bidding. afterall they are the one holding the bid. they state the rules. maybe i can talk to the other mods and admin about the bidding thread. but i dont think we will ever get to control maximum minimum bid and time frame set by the bidders.

mandarins are especially sensitive to freshwater dips because of the mucus. not so much because they are scaleless. tangs are scaleless but respond okay to freshwater dips. however, all scaleless fishes are very sensitive to copper, especially mandarins because again, of their mucus. mandarins slime like crazy in copper and freshwater and this extra mucus will choke the fish. the thick mucus layer is very good for the mandarin as it keeps most smaller parasites like ich away. you almost never see mandarins with ich. only larger isopods can work their way onto mandarins. good luck! manual removal is the only solution IMO here.

some corals/fishes by definition itself is rare and exotic. wether others appreciate it or not is another thing. you cant change the fact that a fish that appears once every year or twice every year, is infact, exotic and rare. but wether you perceive it as a gem or not, thats another thing. rare and exotic stuffs are difficult to lie, especially to more senior reefers. new reefers there's a problem. they have to educate themselves. most people here wont risk embarrasing themselves by saying selling rare stuff, but turns out to be not rare. the senior reefers will flame and i certainly will chide my input if the stuff being sold is common but the seller claims its rare and exotic. but if the thread starter puts there. GEM for bid. what can i do? he sees it as a gem so be it. if someone were to sell a green chromis and calls it a gem. then hey, good for him/her. a gem to him may not be a gem to you. so then simply don't buy. at least he isnt saying "selling RARE and EXOTIC green chromis" that's a different thing that will garner some form of negative feedback. unless the chromis has a rare marking or some kind of unusual variant. for example. a yellow tail damsel = rare and exotic? no. but isit a gem? yes and no. depends on who sees it. example 2. rhomboid wrasse, carmabi basslet = rare and exotic? yes. wether you think so or not, it is rare and it is exotic. that's a fact. but isit a gem? yes and no. i agree with jacky you cannot classify GEM and non GEM. its up to seller up to buyer. dont like it? dont go in. dont make noise. like it? go and bid. rare stuff and exotic stuff cannot really be changed. although for zoanthids it is rather ambiguous as the variety is so diverse. but more or less its there. reefers will definately get some form of rejection and "noise" if cheap stuff are being sold as exotics. but we cant do anything on how anyone else perceives something as a gem or not. here's something to think about. hope i'm making sense this early in the morning.

fast growing palys and very very blue under normal lighting. ups

yes and not to mention the dark skirt. its a really good contrast. thumbs up for this guy. have been looking awhile for it. wuld buy if there were more polyps. ups

dont dip mandarins in freshwater. you will kill it. they have no scales and you will screw up their mucus layer like this.

my family will be around, and will try to ask some reefers to pop by and check occasionally. hope everything goes well. 3 weeks is a long time.

yeah some school thing. humanitarian work sorta thing. 3 weeks is plenty of time for dear murphy to visit my tank and potentially crash it... but i volunteered and must help lah. the reward for the trip quite good too... cca points and other schoolish stuff

hey no lah don't say that. besides i havent really been studying that much....yet. lolz. so no worries la no stress. its good to let off bottled up thoughts and feelings about stuff once in awhile. i believe this profiteering thing has got many reefers wondering, so its good to clear the air. there are good profiteers and bad profiteers, but as humans we cannot pinpoint the good and the bad. so i guess at times we have to live with it and exercise caution. will definately meet up after exams! before my 3 week trip to india

thanks jacky.... like i have said before, this is a very grey topic and there's not much right or wrong. just how people percieve it. at the end of the day, - we can only help new reefers to a certain extent. we can help them by asking them, to help themselves - we cannot do anything to pasar malam threads. and what goes on in there, the admins have no say. reefers discretion should be practiced. - experience is important, and through making mistakes we learn. - some things may be percieved as worthy or the increased in price, while others may disagree. personally for me, i wont mind paying more for a very stable fish than risk getting it from a lfs, only having a 20% thereabouts of success. thank you for the compliment... i guess being a relatively new reefer, only join in late 08', i have made many mistakes and can relate to some of the problems faced here. especially those made by the newer reefers.

you're right jacky. it is a very subjective topic that is grey. but this discussion was started in the first place because of this. we can go on talking for ever and ever and ever and there will be no end. what we are doing is stating different opinions and letting the public decide where they stand and what they wanna do. if you think someone is profitereering, fine. don't patronise the thread. but at the same time, don't codemn and say things like they are profiteering. if its so subjective and everyone has their own opinions, best not to start a debate or else it could go out of hand. if it doesnt suit you, keep it to oneself and dont patronise. that is what i believe. personally for me, i am kinda lucky to have the chance to own a few rare stuff and these rarities are usually not easy to sustain. take for example rare fishes like the rhomboid wrasse. my personal experienced that bit me in the behind. spend $200+ retail price from LFS, but died the next day due to decompression problem and internal parasites. bought another one from a reefer and its alive with me till now. personally if i were to resell this fish, it could easily hit 300 and there will be no shortage of people willing to pay for it. but for that extra 100, which goes into months of stabalising, feeding, training it to alpha male, to me, its worth it. fishes like this have no chance of staying at the LFS for even a few hours, let alone 1 day. you risk buying rare stuff and you risk losing it. i lost my first rhomboid within 24 hours and it hurt like hell. some things deserve to have a higher price because they deserve the price and all the effort put into it. i'm not saying everything is like this, just some. that's where IMO, its not profiteering. according to you, profiteering is unethical profit. in this case, nothing unethical to me.

parasitic isopods are deadly if you have them. faster remove as many as you can find before they reproduce. they mainly feed at night and detach in the day. but some cling on thourhgout. prolonged exposure to parasitic ispods in large numbers can and will kill your fish over time.

such gems deserve a higher price. $40.

and please, might i add. not everything that is expensive and glorious is PROFITEERING. there are some corals that come only once in a lifetime, and some reefers are lucky enough to get hold of it. by selling it at its worthy price is NOT profiteering. take my blue favia and cedric's royal blue millie for example. how often do you see such corals? do you see them everyday? or every month? how about every year? i'm not an sps person so i can't say much for the millie. but for my favia which is so blue, to be honest, i don't see it often. maybe i don't look hard enough. lets say you spend $10 on a pickaxe. and you manage to mine a diamond. a really big and rare diamond. are you goong to sell it at $10? or are you gonna make a fortune out of it? if you know that it is worth X amount, will you sell it at $10 because you don't want to profit from others? this profiteering thing applies throughout the world. of course what really matters is the intention.