Angela_96

I order 99.9% of my fish through the internet or other methods besides stores All of my fish are healthy and I have not had any problems out of any of them being disease ridden. My mil has bought all of her fish from LFS's, she lost all of her guppy males the other day, she is swearing that basicly they are like ticking time bombs. That the fish stores put something in the water to make them die out after a certain amt of time so you will go back and buy more.

I have no choice but to kind of say well, all of my fish are healthy, and knock on wood I haven't pulled a deady out in months eventhough I have one kull fry I need to take care of I just don't have the heart to yet but I avoid it when packaging up fry for people (it just has not grown at all).

Because of my method of buying fish she now thinks she is completly right. I have some guppy fry now, so she is waiting on them to grow out because she will no longer buy from a fish store.

This is the same lady who I do the water testing for and have taught her how to do the vaccuming, etc she does great w/ the maintence so I know that her tank was well taken care of when she lost her guppies. It might just have been a bad shipment to that store, maybe I can go scoop some out of my mothers tank for her since my mom is wanting to go back to african cichlids (oh I am going to have fun stocking my moms tank with my fry I am going to do her an all male tank, all she knows is she likes the blues, the yellows I am going to make sure she gets some hongi and afras so when people see her tank she can send them my way.... and my stepdad does the tank stuff)

But I can't get over my mil, she really has a conspiracy therory going!

Fishies-for-me

Well maybe they don't actually do it on perpose butttt....they order mass produced stock...treat them as any old stock ( not so much as LIVEstock )...cram them into overcrowded disease ridden tanks with little or no quarentine...yeah I can see where she would get that idea...lol....hope she has good luck with your fish.

Marc

Most guppies available are so inbred they practically melt. I've bought a bag of 12 pairs of guppies and lost about 17 fish from the batch. No ammonia, no nitrites, less than 25 nitrates, eating...it's a crapshoot sometimes. Of course, this is a fairly regular occurence--I've had entire bags of panda corydoras die because they arrived so neglected.

Disease doesn't concern me when it comes to the fish I carry where I work. Why? Most of the fish I get in have already been in water housing thousands of other fish without quarantine. They are then shipped to the local wholesaler where they are kept with thousands of other fish without quarantine. They then come to the store where they are kept with hundreds of other fish without quarantine. And I've had one outbreak of ICH in the past year (long story short, I wasn't there and someone dumped a bag of 'salty' hatchets into a tank). I wouldn't sell a fish that wasn't healthy enough to live in water that wasn't crawling with the diseases you are more than likely to find in a tank.

Does she acclimate her fish properly? That would be a major factor... that, and keeping up on water changes and buying fish from a store that does the same.

Hypnox

Your mil is correct, there is a conspiracy. But it's not the fish, it's the accessories. They conspire to add a 200% markup on everything except fish and tanks.

Dino

Well, in the case of guppies, I know of no major farm here in the US producing them.
The ones you find in the shops are imported from Asia.
They are tranqued and shiped in insane numbers to make the most profit.
Which is why our guppies come from individual breeders.

Angela_96

The trio I had bought from you was planned to go to her, she beat me to the punch and bought some guppies that same week. So I had an empty tank and well, now I have some fry too.... I am going to give her some of them I told her she would def have some healthy guppies then. I told her not to buy any, and I should have told her, I cannot ever just surprise that woman! It kills me. I guess I am just going to have to ban her from buying fish until I can fill her tank for her.