Loaches Online Forum

G'day all.

Thought I'd give a bit of an introduction. My name is Setsuna and I live in Victoria, Australia. I'm studying to become an animal handler, and hope to work my way up to becoming a vet.

I've always had fish, predominantly goldfish and Betta Splendens, but in August this year my brother inlaw gave me a 60L tank and I have a tropical community tank.

In this tank I have (please forgive my spelling) 3 kuhlie loaches, 1 hillstream loach (not sure what species), 2 angelfish, 4 guppies, 2 corys, a bristlenose, 3 rams and a male betta splendens (and no, I havn't had any agression from the betta towards any of the other fish).

The afore mentioned brother inlaw has just built me a second tank as a combined birthday and christmas present. It is 4' long by 1' wide and 1' deep.

As I've fallen for hillstream loaches, I've decided to turn this new tank into a river tank as Martin Thoene has done.

I decided to join this forum so I can find out all I can about hillstreams before I start this tank.

Hope I havn't bored you all to tears with my long winded intro ^_^

Welcome to Loaches On-Line.

Welcome Setsuna

And post us some pics of your new tank.

Not boring at all Setsuna, and welcome.

It's very nice for us to get a good introduction to someone new on here. It allows us a baseline indication of your setup, knowledge and experience.

It's obvious that you must have read my article or articles, so you're aware that your hillstream is not living in ideal conditions right now.

So....anything you want to know ask away. We do have some Oz members here, so any query that comes down to availability of something over there can possibly be answered by them.

That's a good part of this forum. We have a truly international membership that even includes people who go and catch these fish in local streams. Therefore, have access to lots of local knowledge about natural habitat.

Martin.

G'day Setsuna, and welcome to Loaches Online.

And your more than welcome, not to mention the Ashes.

Thanks everyone. I'm going to move my current hillstream into the new tank, even though he/she/it seems happy where it is at the moment.

Graeme, your more then welcome to win the Ashes as far as I'm concerned. I'm more of an AFL and Soccer girl then cricket ^_^

Am I right in thinking that Gippsland is somewhere to the East of Melbourne? How are you off for places to buy fish and equipment?

Martin.

Yes, the part of Gippsland I live in is 200kms east of Melbourne (I should know, driven back and forth for a year before I moved up here).

In the nearest town to me (10kms away) there is an aquarium and Pet Stock. Although the aquarium has almost soley fish, they aren't honest people and dont care too much about the fish they sell.

The 'fish lady' (Julie) at petstock is still new to fish, but she at least tries. I tend to get most of my fish from Petstock and when I have my new tank setup Julie is going to make me a deal on the hillstreams. She's going to sell me them for half price, plus my 10% VIP discount.

Normally hillstreams (or Borneos as Petstock and the aquarium calls them) are $AU12 each.

As for the equipment, my sister inlaw breeds guppies and bristlenose. She put me on to an online aquarium store in Queensland that sells equipment for less than half the price that we've seen them in any shop.