If there's any temp I should be worried about, it seems it's the sculpins
and not their food. The fish I've brought in were taken from 33 F water (it
was literally freezing as we went) and have stayed well below 70 F their
entire stay here. I'm interested to see if they can't be stabilized prior
to the summer warm up and deal just fine with the 76 F that the systems went
to last summer. If that's the case, then I guess late fall collecting is
the best time to bother with them. I think it's pretty obvious that summer
collecting is pretty much asking for failure. I've had them just die right
in my hand as I was pulling them out of the seine in the summer... Ooops.
Nice conservation work there monkey boy. :)
With the small tanks, I think it will be obtainable to drop in ice cubes in
some sort of container to keep the edge off if they get into trouble. That
will definately have to be played with tho... It'd be really easy to swing
the temp down, then swing it back up while I was sleeping or something. And
that can't be good either.
Anyway.. Thanks for the thoughts!
Todd
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Wolfe" <mwolfe_at_mindspring.com>
To: <nanfa_at_aquaria.net>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2004 7:50 AM
Subject: RE: NANFA-- Guppies as sculpin food
> Todd, Since others are answering the sculpin question much better than I
> could I will add some info to the guppy question. Guppies can survive
very
> well in much cooler temps! I had a similar idea (to use guppies as food
> for my pickerel... I mean hey... the look like gambusia!). Being in
> Georgia, I kept the guppies in plastic trash cans outside (35 gallons...
> deep enough for them to get away from the heat here in GA). During the
> spring and summer they thrived and reproduced like crazy. But even in the
> fall they were going strong when the temps were down in the 50s and even
> 40s. Only problem I had was a snap freeze that killed on of the
containers
> (I had two at the time). THe one real close to the house was OK, the
other
> farther out and exposed to direct night sky, froze over and that killed
all
> the guppies in that trash can... over night.
>
> Thinking further about grown and such, you may want to experiment with
> whether you get acceptable growth and reproduction rates at the low temps
> you are considering, but I know for a fact that they will survive the
temps
> of a basement. Mine are currently breeding and refilling the trash cans
> sitting on the basement from here in GA with no heat (but then again my
> basement never gets to 50 degrees.
>
> MWolfe
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