Aquarette – an ideal Place for Fishes
If there is no room in the house or conservatory for the larger tanks, or if one is sufficiently interested in pond life or in breeding live food for the Fishes, individual species of the minutiae of the pond can be kept separately in small aquariums. These may consist of old accumulator jars, very small aquarium, tanks, the despised jam-jar, old pie-dishes or even the glass jars used for preserved meat.
To describe this type of aquarium I have coined the word aquarette. Where possible they should be set up in similar fashion to the larger kind a layer of gravel and, if there is room, an oxygenating· plant; in any case one of the floating plants will improve matters. It is a good plan to have a different floating plant for each aquarette, such a collection is both interesting and effective.
To stock the aquarette it is necessary to visit a natural pond of long standing. Equipment in the shape of wide-mouthed bottles and a muslin or canvas water-net is necessary, although I have on occasion had a most variegated haul by just pulling a clump of water-weed to the side with the crook of a walking-stick and putting it straight away into a jam-jar. Then, on arriving home the weed was placed in a larger vessel of water when hosts of small creatures emerged from’ nooks and crannies and so could be removed to separate quarters by using a glass dip-tube. In any case, no matter how the material is acquired, it should be placed, for preference, in a shallow dish; then the various organisms can be picked out and placed m their respective aquarettes.
Daphne are fairly easy to recognise by their corpulent look and by their curious jerking and tumbling mode of progression. Cyclops is slightly smaller and is quite slender, it progresses by a series of tiny jerks. The females are easy to recognize by the two pouches of eggs, both nearly as large as the creature itself, which project from the body like pale green wings.