"Tidepool Geek" wrote in message ...
I subscribe to rec.aquaria.marine.reefs & rec.aquaria.marine.misc and have
for some time (several years on r.a.m.r). I'm a recent subscriber to
rec.aquaria.marine.tech. In my memory none of those fora have had threads
concerning cold water aquarium keeping.

Then start one yourself! What is stopping you ? ;-)
I am sure there will be no coldwater thread on your
new mailing list before someone actualy creates one...
Bring your guys to rec.aquaria.marine and start writing!
Bump up this info to noise ratio :-)

All 12 hits were from r.a.m.r. The only other cold water related thread that
I can recall is one from about a year and a half ago (also on r.a.m.r.) in
which you inquired about putting the quasi cold water species Crassostrea
gigas (Pacific Oyster) into a tropical tank; how did that work out?

See - there was no thread about the oysters - so I have created one! :-)

The oysters lived for a while, but I have overfed the tank with dead
phytoplankton and run into water quality problems. The tank was populated
with macroalgae and they also run out of controll - to make long story
short I had to go for a business trip lasting 5 days and did not
instruct family how to care for them correctly - all big Pacific ones
died when I got back. There were two small Japanese ones left alive
but due to the water quality problems in their tank I decide to
transfer them into my reef tank and they were too often bothered
by my hermit crabs and shrimps. As a result they stay closed for
a month or two, almost not feeding at all, and one day I noticed my
Lysmata shrimps pulling pieces of oyster meet from a gaping shell :-(

Basically, I would say from my experiment, the species of oysters
I tried are not very picky about the temperatures in normal tropical
reef tanks. Feeding them and other animals picking on them are much
more of a problem from what I found out... I saw shells growing,
not calcerous as the ones created in the nature, but they were ok.
They did not show up decrease in health when the water quality was good.
Since the experiment did not last long I cannot tell how the
temperature influenced other factors of their lives...
I was worried for too low oxygen levels, too high metabolism levels,
nothing like this was really a problem, they seem to be happy, as
the oyster can show it is happy ;-)

I will probably decide to buy some oysters again, this time in
my local Jewel-Osco groceries - I have noticed they carry live
oysters, clams and scallops. This time I will buy them in same
quantities just to keep them as the plankton creators for
the main reef. I read about induced spawning of ripe oysters
and it looks they produce milions of eggs per animal - and
these eggs are very nutritious meal for filter feeders...
The idea I got from the LFS, their frozen food section:
they had frozen oyster eggs on sale as a food for $24 per
small can... It looked much overpriced and I will try to produce
such food for myself.

Further, the Coldwaterfish list has, as I mentioned earlier,
been in existence for four years now; hardly what you'd
call a 'Johnny come lately'!

The thing is that while usenet was always quite popular, private
groups on yahoo are quite hidden somewhere out there... :-)
I have never hard about your group before - maybe it is
my fault for not looking hard enough ;-)

In any case, if you prefer to discuss cold water husbandry on one of the
existing newsgroups, please do so. I never intended to coerce you or anyone
else to join our list, but merely to inform you of its existence.

I think I will visit your yahoo group, but mailing list is rather not my thing.
Do you all plan to move there from yahoo ?

Since I've sort of broken my promise about not promoting the list for at
least a month by posting this message, I will now shut the h*ll up for at
least two months.

I would mind if you advertised tennis shoes here...
But the subject of fish keeping like this one ?
I am sure you are more than welcomed here...