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It seems recently Ive been hearing a lot of people not having very good luck with fish lately.. Any reason why.? Is it the way theyre being caught, or shipping. Is it simply just bad luck, or bad fish keepers.? Thoughts.?

Who knows? Been saying this for months now since my run in with stock from online vendors. My thoughts are that fish are being moved faster and not left in QT long enough because of the economy. It's the typical velvet, ich, etc.. It may be a new strain. Viruses and bacteria are always evolving and getting stronger so they can survive. I think QT is more important than ever.

Mine was being a newbie and lack of QT. It could also be getting bad RODI water from a local LFS. There are a lot of ??? marks still but we are pretty sure the biggest issue was ich and velvet.

Someone asked me the other day where I got all my fish, and almost all my fish came from other peoples tanks, and they have all done very well.. I did buy a few fish, and still had pretty good success, but a couple losses.

 

 

It is interesting indeed and may be hard to correlate each person's experience...It could be the lack of QT by each person along the supply chain, bad genes, bad acclimation processes practiced along the supply chain, shipping issues due to Sandy and/or recent cold weather...who knows, the list is endless in my opinion.

 

I've always wondered if there are environmental events that go undiagnosed which may stress fish/coral that are often overlooked because we look for equipment failures, alk/cal imbalance, nitrates, Ph, TDS, salinity, etc...For instance, how fish/coral react during different phases of the moon...just an idea...

 

I have no evidence (I should really start a log) to promote or disprove anything...Moreover, it may not be a stressful event, one could imagine a spawning or mating event might be related...who knows...just a wacky idea...

 

Personally, I shop only two vendors for fish and will never try other. You'll develop a list of vendors you shop...some for fish, some for inverts, some for coral, and some for dry goods...for whatever reasons, but ultimately you'll frequent the ones that have provided the most successful outcomes. For some, there's a learning curve, for others you get lucky with a vendor from the start!

IME, spring and fall are the worst times to get orders shipped in because the wholesalers don't always know if they should pack cold packs or heat packs or no packs. I can't really fault them though as around this region our weather can fluctuate rapidly from day to day during those months. Making the wrong call results in a very stressful shipment and if the livestock doesn't perish, then the survivors are often diseased or just really unhealthy and need a long time to recuperate.

We used to buy fish from LFS's that didn't QT. When we stopped this practice and just ordered fish wholesale and set up a QT system, our losses went from 60% to 20%. We don't treat in our QT system-just observation for 30 days before transfer to end user.

We also use recycled fish whenever possible.

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