Another way to cool the tank would be by using an old beer cooler if you can get your hands on one, but if you are looking at sticklebacks and minnows etc then if it was me Id chance it without a cooler because it'd probably be ok, so long as the room doent get too warm

best of luck

Kev

You can just put them in a coldwater tank, as the goldfish, they'll be fine. The water wont go higher then 24 if you put the tank away from a heat source and windows. the minnows and sticklebacks are tough little buggers. just think how the weather is in the winter and summer. as long as you will provide a strong water curent in the tank it 'll be ok. i kept minnows, weather loach and other little cold water creatures in a coldwater tank for many years and they did ok, mind you i was leaving back home in romania at that time and the temp difference between summer and winter there is big, 40-48C in summer and -10 -20C in winter. just make sure you get them used to the ph of your water very slowly. a good idea would be to fill the tank with the water from the river you catch the fish and every time you do a water change add some dechlorinated tap water to the river water. start with a rate of 1L of tap water to 9L of river water and increase it every 2-3 weeks by adding 10% of tap water(9:1 , 8:2, 7:3 and so one). i hope this helps. cheers

Thanks all, it starting to seem a little more do-able now!

I was starting to get a little put off with all the expense and difficulty of chillers etc. I don't mind a little hard work but it was starting to look a little foolish at one stage.


All I have to do now is but yet another filter (do tetratec have a bonus buyer scheme), and I'm hot to trot. Have to go away next week so I'll wait until I come back as I'll be broke for a few weeks afterwards.

just a quick update about the tadpoles inside versus the ones outside. I did think that the ones inside were growing slower then their cousins outside but this doesnt seem to be the case now at all. I have baby frogs inside now compared to still only tadpoles outside, some of them dont even have legs yet.

The only thing I can think of is that there are more of them outside so they might not have had as much food as the ones inside. Anyway the little froggers are now outside with their cousins. The kitchen would have been over run and I would probably been evicted.

Probably not much help to you ayway but didnt want to have given you wrong information just in case.

nessa

As for the newts question they can be put in but do need a dry area IE: a section of tank built up like a bank so they can spend time out of the water, in this size tank it may drop your capacity down a bit making the available fish area considerably smaller,
Nessa as for your friend thinking of doing a native marine tank get onto mbuna on the forum he was doing this donkeys years ago successfully and may be of assistance.. as for your tadpole query i'd guess its because the ones in the garden have an unlimited and varied supply of wild food types and are constantly grazing unlike the tank tadpoles which have only you to feed them
Seamus

had a little frog explosion in the kitchen today. Thank god no-one else saw . it was comical trying to catch them all. i lifted the lid to feed them and they bounced out all over the place. they are gorgeous and now living out in the back garden.

are there any rules & regs about re-introducing native species back into the wild. I would like to release some of the frogs back into the river in the park across the road. I dont think there was any spawn there this year but there was some last year. dont want there to be a major catastrophe but dont want them to die because I cant feed them all.