What I did last summer.....

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Skippy

Grand Poobah of Fun
Aug 22, 2000
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Dallas, TX
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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.
 

stoopid

AC Members
May 15, 2003
226
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Won't see me doing that anytime soon, not for lack of willingness, but for lack of even slightly stable temps (the northeast US has a dramatic climate).
 
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