The Puffer Forum

puffertt77 wrote:Be warned though, you'll probably come home with a new fish

But only after doing research and making sure you have the proper tank to house it, right?

Jase wrote:

puffertt77 wrote:Be warned though, you'll probably come home with a new fish

But only after doing research and making sure you have the proper tank to house it, right?

Not nessiarily, you dont always need to research in advance with everything, not everything you read and see on the web is true, i usually place a lot of trust in staff at shops, also the buyer maybe already familar with the species

Bogwoodbruce wrote:

Jase wrote: But only after doing research and making sure you have the proper tank to house it, right?

Not nessiarily, you dont always need to research in advance with everything, not everything you read and see on the web is true, i usually place a lot of trust in staff at shops, also the buyer maybe already familar with the species

It's right you can't believe everything you read on the web, but if you turn to good sites, you will get the best information there. Trusting a LFS is a risky thing. They don't have a clue about fish keeping more often than they have, and this is a worldwide problem. There are very few pet shops I trust, and even there I prefer to check out the information first, as people have different areas of knowledge (ask me about african cichlids, and I am totally blank I couldn't tell one from the other). Before I learned to know what I wanted and needed, about 50 % of the fishes I bought even had the wrong ID. I don't think I've ever been to a LFS where I haven't found mislabelled fishes, not even the shops that has had fishes as a speciality. The best way to a responsible and good fish keeping is reading, reading, reading, and learning from that. I have experienced this very strongly, as I listened to LFSs advices for my first 10 years of fish keeping. I don't have the number of how many fishes I killed during this time, but it's a wonder I didn't give up on fish keeping. It wasn't until I found a good fish keeping forum that I started to understand and learn, and started to be a more responsible fish keeper. So, yes, it's healthy to be sceptical to the information you get online, but you need to be more sceptical to the information you get from LFSs. Of course there are shops that knows what they're doing. But there are an awful lot of them that don't know.

With myself working at an LFS i like to think that i can help most customers with any queeries etc... if not one of our other staff members can.... some shops i tend to put a lot of faith into

There are exceptions, I don't disagree with on that. There are good LFSs out there. But generally there's more LFSs that don't know enough than there are good shops around. All I meant to say was that you can't trust LFSs on a general basis. You never know which shop knows and which doesn't. And you don't know which area of knowledge the good shops are good at either. But again: I still haven't been in a LFS where I haven't found mislabelled fish. You can't trust them to be right. 2 weeks ago I visited a LFS I haven't shopped in before (and won't do again either). The employee claimed to be an expert, keeping fishes for more than 15 years. But still he claimed that the cories were very well, all though they were ill almost all of them. I know my cories, they are one of my three big passions in fish keeping (puffers and suckermouth catfishes are the two others). I know what a cory with IPs look like. I know that when all the cories clamp their fins, there's something wrong. One of them even crouched together because of the IPs, and he claimed that it was misshaped (it wasn't, it was because of the illness. And even if he was right, what did the fish do in the displaytank if there was something wrong with it). Some of the fishes scratched themselves against the sand over and over again. And some had clearly som external parasites as well. There were both sick and dead fish in most tanks, and very few fishes left on the whole. This is only a single example, where they claim to be experts, and they don't even know how to recognize fishes that are ill??? (He also was really stubborn on some information I knew was very wrong, but I didn't want to go into a quarrel - it was no point in it. Yes there are good, skillful people out there, but don't count on it.

I've never been to a LFS where people knew what they were talking about. The worst one is actually my favorite, because the manager knows everyone and their pets and gives me free stuff, but I don't trust him at all to give me correct info. He thinks that four GSPs can live happily in a 10g for life, and he can't ID a fish to save his life.

I know that there are fish stores where people are knowledgeable, but that's the exception, not the rule. Bogwoodbruce should be proud that he's one of the few, of course!