ihaveherps said:
Sorry to take your thread slightly off topic, but those who feed gambusia, do you clean them out (flush toxicants) before feeding? I only ask as when i was about 10 i caught some and tried to keep them as pets, but for a week or two they made the water go an opaque white, which in hindsight was probably due to the sub-standard conditions of the water-way from which they were caught. Im just interested in varying the diets of my lizards some more, and they would be cost effective and nutritious but have concerns about their ability to pass on pollution to my herps.
No, I don't, they're frozen very soon after I catch them. Gambusia won't turn the water opaque, you'll find that if you set up a new aquarium, especially if you're using new gravel, the water can go opaque, even if you don't add fish. This is probably what you experienced. A couple of girls from the lab I'm based in are doing research involving Gambusia, they travel all over the state to get them from as many locations and water qualities as possible, there are often about a dozen aquaria in the lab crammed full of them (several hundred in a 2ft tank etc). The water is always perfectly clear.
Nina: yes, guppies are little fish with colourful tails (well, the males are, sometimes the females are rather drab). Gambusia are not guppies, although some people use this common name for them (here we go again with common names causing confusion). Their most common common names are Gambusia, Mosquito fish (they were originally brought in to control mosquitoes, which has a dismal failure which you'd think a five year old could have predicted), Plague Minnow and Guppy. It's probably best to call them Gambusia.
Incidentally, some people who have obtained Varanus gilleni from me sometimes feed them Guppies (true Guppies, Poecilia reticulata).
The picture seems to be a bit decieving, it's not all that huge a Gambusia, I often get them twice as large. I think it looks larger than it is because on most monitors it's coming up larger than life sized and the image is reasonably sharp. Occassionally you do get a monster Gambusia about four times the size of that one, and for some reason I always get excited about them