Skippy
09-22-2003, 7:22 AM
Here's an interseting experiment I just did this last summer.
I live in Texas, we have warm temps from around late april until about now. (Defining warm as not getting below 65 degrees)
A friend gave be a 150 gallon rubbermaid livestock trough/pond/thingy which had a small pond filter in it.
I had a tank of Opaline Paradise Gourami who has just spawned and had about 2 dozen fry at about 1/4 inch long in APril.
Well. I decided to see how hearty these fish were, I already knew they were very tolerant of wide varieties in temp. I filled the 150 out behind my house, in plain open sunlight most of the day. I planted it with a ton of scraps and stemps and cuttings from all my plants inside. (I have alot of fast growing plants). And dropped them in.
I wanted to see if they could really survive the summer in a less than perfect environment. They would get food from mosquitos and insects.
I only added water to that tank twice all summer (It was a really wet summer here in north Texas).
This last week we had what I thought would be our first real cold snap, so I drained it and brought them all back in. This was the first time I had paid much attention to how they were doing.
All seem to have survived, although a few might have been lost. The average size of them was about 1 inch long. This is not the surprising part. They had easily twice the coloration of the parents who were still inside, and the fins were longer on these 1 inch juvis than on the 2/2.5 inch parents. I may have to start letting more of my fish take summer vacation outside.
I hope to put pics up later today , since I was busy for the last 6 months and really fell off the face of the earth as far as the hobby was considered and I'm just not getting things back to "presentable" state.
I live in Texas, we have warm temps from around late april until about now. (Defining warm as not getting below 65 degrees)
A friend gave be a 150 gallon rubbermaid livestock trough/pond/thingy which had a small pond filter in it.
I had a tank of Opaline Paradise Gourami who has just spawned and had about 2 dozen fry at about 1/4 inch long in APril.
Well. I decided to see how hearty these fish were, I already knew they were very tolerant of wide varieties in temp. I filled the 150 out behind my house, in plain open sunlight most of the day. I planted it with a ton of scraps and stemps and cuttings from all my plants inside. (I have alot of fast growing plants). And dropped them in.
I wanted to see if they could really survive the summer in a less than perfect environment. They would get food from mosquitos and insects.
I only added water to that tank twice all summer (It was a really wet summer here in north Texas).
This last week we had what I thought would be our first real cold snap, so I drained it and brought them all back in. This was the first time I had paid much attention to how they were doing.
All seem to have survived, although a few might have been lost. The average size of them was about 1 inch long. This is not the surprising part. They had easily twice the coloration of the parents who were still inside, and the fins were longer on these 1 inch juvis than on the 2/2.5 inch parents. I may have to start letting more of my fish take summer vacation outside.
I hope to put pics up later today , since I was busy for the last 6 months and really fell off the face of the earth as far as the hobby was considered and I'm just not getting things back to "presentable" state.