The Puffer Forum

and it bothers me. And I work there a few hours a week so it bothers me even more that I have to be affiliated with it and I can't do anything to change it. Lately we've only been getting GSP's, no F8s.... would F8s fair better in freshwater than GSPs, since their ideal salinity is lower than the GSPs'? I kind of figured they would... so I suggested to my boss that next time he orders "freshwater" puffers that he should just order F8s in place of the GSPs, since they'll all be sold as freshwater. Was this a good move? Plus don't F8s not get as large?

F8 probably would fare better than GSPs but fresh is still not ideal. Can you direct your boss to this site, or pufferlist.com?

Neither is ideal, but F8's certainly better to sell than GSP's.
They only get to 3" vs. 6 for GSP's, and as you said, have a lower salinity. DO your best to at least inform your customers of their needs, if you can not change your boss' mind.

Yea, local Petco's put all F8s and GSP in freshwater... It saddens me. But I think they look at the fact that they can USUALLY SURVIVE (be it healthy or not, they don't care, just so long as they sell em) for long periods of time in freshwater... But after a while, they begin to look really bad, losing patches oif skin and stuff...

Yeah, when I bought my figure8s monday at Petco they had them and the gsps in one tank in freshwater, and they guy we talked to said he was going to switch them over to saltwater sometime soon because he knew they needed it. Still need to go by and check if they let him though!

You could always print off their respective pages from the pufferlist and put them on the tank so people can see what they are getting into.

I really wish LFSs would have critical care info labeled on the tanks.

If I insisted customers keep them in brackish then we probably wouldn't sell nearly as many (which matters more to the owners than it does to me)... plus I don't talk to the customers, I just clean and do tank maintenance. The other people who work there know that GSP's and F8's can tolerate brackish, I'm not sure everybody knows that it's actually beneficial, but a lot of them do and they don't seem to see it as detrimental. As long as we can sell them to someone and they can stay alive for several years than it's good enough. I doubt if I informed them otherwise it would have much of an impact because I am the 6-hour-a week cleaner novice-to-fish girl, amongst a bunch of middle aged men who have been keeping fish 20+ years.

The whole place isn't terrible, though, I mean everybody does inform novices about the nitrogen cycle and all (I've seen my boss refrain from selling a girl a fish that she wanted on initial setup and ended up giving her feeder fish to cycle with instead), so they're knowledgeable, but they seem to not care about the freshwater. We are kind of a specialty marine store with lots of inverts and corals and anemones and things so the freshwater section which is less profitable I guess in comparison is sort of tossed aside a lot of the time.

The only good news is that my semi-boss told me that they probably won't be ordering gsp/f8s much anymore, or atleast for a while, because they don't sell well enough anyways.

As for critical care info, yeah I wish we had that. WE don't even have prices on the tanks because our stock is always fluctuating and different, and the tanks are all just mixed, we don't even organize the species, really.

You'd be suprised about the profits pulled in my the FW dep't, even in a maily marine store. One of my lfs owners told me that he'd be rid of the FW section entirely if it didn't make the store so much money; and this is a primarily SW store.

Hmmm. Yeah, I think we try to keep stuff that petsmart etc. doesn't have so there isn't as much competition. We get run of the mill guppies and stuff but we also get a lot of oddballs regularly (baby whales, elephant noses, archers, "freshwater" puffs, african butterfly fish, etc etc), but they don't sell so well. Which is stupid to me, if I had enough tanks I'd buy all of them!

So we mainly get novices and little kids making mommy buy them goldfish or something for a few bucks, then we get these regulars who are spending $100+ on corals. I guess they are more negligent of the FW because if we lose a guppy it's not going to have as much of a financial impact as if we lose a harlequin tusk or something.

yeh the Archers are BW too, but I do keep seeing them in FW at petco/LFS

-Pete