It certainly does make you wonder! He's such a lovely looking fish, I don't understand why anyone would want a stunted, deformed version crammed into their living room

INJAF has an article on RTCs, we had an idea of how to get people to think about what they were taking on in a slightly different way. If you like kittens and lions as well as fish … http://injaf.org/care-and-information ... tfish-an-aquatic-big-cat/

The Deep are heavily involved in the Big Fish Campaign and posted a brilliant video of one of their RTCs on Facebook recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv0KENSG-o4

There's a diver hand feeding the RTC, that's when you realise just how big the fish is!

If you took out the whole of the old filter media after a week i'd guess the bacterial colony has taken a dive and will take a while to get back up to speed, especially with it being a little colder. Filter bacteria don't move voluntarily, they establish enough of a colony to deal with the level of waste available (assuming there's enough media to house them all). They won't migrate to new media if there is adequate food and suitable conditions for them on the old stuff, if that makes sense. Ideally you need to do a gradual swap, by removing bits of the old media every now and then the colony will take a slight knock and then increase in numbers and be forced to colonise the new media You could get some Seachem Prime, I believe you can get a pond strength one, but if not then 5ml treats 200l for normal dechlorination but you can use up to 5x the normal dose to detox ammonia and nitrite as a short term measure

Do you have any pond salt? 1 gram per litre of water will counter any effects of nitrite poisoning and help the fish feel a lot better Nitrite binds with the blood and stops oxygen binding with the blood, salt has a chemical reaction with nitrite that prevents this

Doh! How did I miss that bit!?!? Should have read it on computer and not on tiny phone screen! Thankfully V is on the ball Will have a play tomorrow, see if I can figure out how much the spoon holds, remind me if I don't report back!

I use those kits, I just dig the spoon in the powder so it's full then tip it in the test tube I get different results for different water, so I'm confident it works fine even if it doesn't seem the most accurate means of measuring Personally I prefer it to other tests, I've found it much easier to read

Happy birthday Hope you've had a fab day!

Ooh, exciting! The little devil, maybe she was just enjoying have two boys fighting over her FX some of the little guys evade their tank mates

That's lovely! The way the fins are flowing on the oranda are amazing What a lovely way to remember them

Brilliant Nice work, they look really good

That is a bit odd, glad you've got it sorted though