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[Yiab]

So I'm attempting to build as diverse a meat/leather industry as possible and I seem to have depleted my local elven civilization's available options (they still bring dozens of the same animals, but no new ones), so I've begun trying to deliberately trap more creatures myself.
Seeing a small group of pond grabbers enter the screen, I decided to try and trap them. To this end, I set up a line of cage traps in a passage I can flood or empty at the pull of a lever. After flooding it, one pond grabber walked in and promptly vanished - I couldn't find any loose cages, but one of the cage traps had been triggered (or not fully prepared before I locked the passage down for flooding). Later, after draining the passage, I found one of my dwarves butchering a pond grabber corpse which was inside a cage.
I'm guessing that the pond grabber promptly died upon being stuck inside a waterless cage, so I'm looking for answers to two questions:
1) Do cage traps work as expected while submerged underwater? (i.e. do they still catch things that are on their square?)
2) Is there any way to specify that a specific cage trap uses an aquarium rather than a cage/terrarium? (Secondarily, will this actually keep captured aquatic creatures alive?)

[Eagle_eye]

The catching the elusive mermaid thread may answer some questions

[darthbob88]

Can't speak as to number 2, but I know number 1 is true, cage traps do work underwater. I caught more than a few foo-men using cage traps in my aqueducts, and a few cave crocs as well. Dunno about aquatic critters, though.

[Retro]

First, yeah, cages work in cage traps. You don't need 'aquariums' though, any cage will do. Here's the trick: To capture aquatic creatures without killing them, they must be captured in 4/7 or greater water. 3/7 or less and they drown, even if you fill up the area with water seconds after. Furthermore, as dwarves can't walk in 4/7 or greater water, your retrieval system will be tricky.

I tried this out on carp once; click the 'and other useful stuff' link in my sig and scroll to Weaponizing Carp for a whole bunch of info. All from 40d but not dated yet, I believe.

[Gus Smedstad]

From your page, it seems straightforward - you need a way to flood the capture area to 7/7, and then drain it once the beasties are in cages, where they apparently have an invisible water supply.

One thing I found puzzling on that page was your bit about submerged waterwheels - the engine you describe has the water flowing perpendicular to the wheels.  I kind of assumed the flow had to be along the same direction as the wheel.

 - Gus

[Retro]

Flow is pretty weird in DF. If a body of water is first created with flow, it will always have flow until the levels get to low. If it is created as a static body and flow is added, it will never have flow. All this despite what you'd think otherwise. So filling up a big room with water marked as 'flow' will make the entire room 'flow.' All waterwheels will work. It's possible it'd work without the drainage pipe, too, leaving you with a static body of water that somehow perpetually pushes itself around.

[Gus Smedstad]

Ah, so you're relying on a source that has natural "flow" like a river.  I know it doesn't work that way when your source is static like cavern lake.  That will provide power, but you have to make sure the water is actually moving.  Once the entire channel hits 7/7, the water wheels stop working.

 - Gus

[Retro]

No, in this case I'm relying on pumps to create flowing water. And the entire channel does fill to 7/7. However, since the water was created with flow and the flow is never turned off, the water will retain the flow despite all common sense and knowledge of physics dictating otherwise - unlike an initially static body of water like a cavern lake, in which you have to do quite a lot to make it count as 'flow.' You can try it yourself if you like. Created wheel-filled dry pit, hook up three pumps in and a one-tile-wide drainage passage out. The pit will fill but the flow will not disappear, and I suspect but cannot confirm that if you turn off the pumps and block the drainage passage the flow will be retained. As far as I can tell, flow can only be created or removed between around 3/7 and 6/7 water. If the body is full (7/7) without flow, you can never create flow until you lower it. If it is filled with flow, the flow tag will never be unchecked until you likewise lower the water level.

It's a huge logically fallacy, and I ought to do a few tests to confirm it, but from what I can tell it IS true.

[Yiab]

Thank you very much, Retro, your advice worked well. After killing another pond grabber by accidentally capturing it in too shallow water, I successfully captured one alive. I don't know about other versions, but in 31.03 the water it is captured with isn't invisible - it is listed in the cage with "water covering" and it is also carrying "water covering" on itself.

Next, I moved on to training - the wiki lists the pond grabber as having petvalue:50, and I confirmed this in my own raw files, so I figured it shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear in the list when I go to the kennel to tame a large animal (tame a small animal also doesn't recognize it, but I didn't expect it to as it's not vermin).
There is no [PET_EXOTIC] tag on the pond grabber on the wiki, but since I've been having the bug where I can never get a Baron or Dungeon Master, I removed all those tags from the raws before creating my current world anyway, so missing a dungeon master shouldn't matter here.
Why can't I tame the pond grabber? What am I missing?

Update: I tried deconstructing and reconstructing the kennel, it didn't help.

[Tiphareth]

doesn't it need the [PET] tag to be tameable? Or did you edit that in when you edited out [PET:EXOTIC]?

[Yiab]

I did a mass replace on all the creature files of [PET_EXOTIC] with [PET] (the fact that I currently have a war dragon guarding my artifacts proves that it worked). You seem to be correct though, that the pond grabber is missing a [PET] tag even though it has a petvalue.
Regardless, I've hit another interesting thing.
Three times now I have transferred captured pond grabbers from their capture cages (which I like to free up frequently so I can keep things reliably colour-coded) to an aquarium. Obviously, I did the transfer in air since it needed to be done by a dwarf. Even though the aquarium clearly had the water already in it (visible by the icon and in the inventory), the pond grabbers proceeded to air drown inside the aquarium. This seems consistent with them only surviving if captured in deep water, so I'm guessing it's another facet of the same bug/feature.

[numerobis]

The aquarium you're putting it in is filled with air.  I haven't found a particularly good way to move tame fish between cages.  For untamed fish, you can create a 1x2 channel.  Build the fish cage attached to a lever in one side, build a cage trap with the target cage in the other side (forbid all other cages).  Fill with water.  Pull the lever.  Wait until the fish gets trapped in the cage trap.  *Now* you can tame the fish.

If you want to breed the fish for slaughter, it's a bit tricky.  You need to tame one exemplar of the species, which is pretty easy once you get the hang of it.  To breed, they have to be uncaged, so you can trap a few and build their levered cages in a dry pond, fill the pond, pull the lever to release.

Now you want to slaughter them: you need to take them to the butcher shop.  You can't butcher dead tame animals; they have to enter the butcher shop live.  So you need to somehow grab the fish you want while it's still alive out of the water and to the butcher shop -- good luck!  Much easier: tame one exemplar and put it in the dining room.  Then capture a bunch more untamed and just dump them into a pond system that lets you easily enough isolate a few fish.  They'll breed in the ponds.  When your dwarves get hungry or need to wash up in carp tallow soap, isolate a fish or two.  Drain the isolated pond.  The fish flop around a bit in the air until they become wild corpses.  Those you *can* slaughter.

[Yiab]

I'm confused - you say the aquarium is filled with air, but I made certain to wait until the dwarves had put the water in before I transferred anything. I can understand if it's a bug that a creature's drowning state will be frozen on entering a cage (meaning that aquatic creatures put in a cage from air will still be air-drowning), but I don't understand how a clear glass terrarrium, built and set to be an aquarium, whose inventory reads [Water 10] can be said to have no water in it.

[numerobis]

Interesting.  I hadn't seen the [water 10] in a cage thing before.  How did you get the dwarves to fill the cage with water?  The only way I'd found before is for the cage to trap the animal while underwater.

[Retro]

I wouldn't know about the [water 10] thing. All I know is that the fish's drowning/not drowning tag is frozen while caged, letting you move around and store fish in ordinary stockpiles so long as you caught them under the right circumstances.