Debate
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ALW
What works for one may not work for another!
IMO, most LFS dont really care, as they see the fish as a simple product which is if sold make them money. they dont care if the fish breed of not, as the saying goes 'Out of sight, out of mind'
FeroX
Fish Fanatic
Extremely well said. Honestly, they're tiny little fish, and it's only natural for the strongest to survive. What better to do than breed your own food?! Do you feel bad for the cute baby cows and cute baby pigs that are born on farms only to be raised to be slaughtered to feed YOU? Same thing...do you go around saving every other calf...no. I know you're thinking you prolly don't have the power to, and perhaps the fish you're feeding don't SOLELY rely on feeder culls for food, but you get my point.
And the whole LFS thing....let me just say it:
WE DON'T WANT YOUR MOLLYS/GUPPYS/PLATY FRY! Got baby africans? Hell yeah, we'll take em, people want those! Even Osphronemidae family fish we'll take (labyrinth fish), but we don't want livebearers. More often than not we already have too many...orders usually come in 60 or 80 a peice. I've had countless customers come in (always women, no offense, just thought I'd point it out/found it funny) come in w/ tupperware containers containing their livebearer fry. We can't even sell anything unless it's 1" long too. What happens more often than not is we wait until the lady is looking other way or goes away and we feed them off. It's a lot cheaper than feeding using food from our store. One time we had a tank full of hungry juvi clown knives. Some lady comes in with a good 15 molly fry...well guess where they went? So even if you do get your 50 cents/fish (25 cents if uber-small) they still might be fed off, as any tax on any product will counteract the credit you just got, as it's so miniscule.
Just cull the inferior specimens and carry on as mother nature intended, jeez. I get a good chuckle out of the societies I see at the back of some magazines. One in particular was "Feeder Guppy and Cull Rescue Association". HAHAHAHAH...wow, a little over the top. Apparantly they go around buying feeder guppies and culls so that they don't get fed off and set up tanks for these incredibly dull, boring, sickly fish.
EDIT - And yes, BigC, lfs do sell feeders. Including rosey red minnows, various sizes of comet goldfish, feeder guppies and feeder platys.
FeroX
Fish Fanatic
Yeah, it's just useless bringing LFS your fish, just feed them off or give them to someone who wants free, hardy fish. Use the LFS as your last resort. Nothing is more irritating than seeing some lady walk in and begging us to take her poor "babies". Best part is if they're mollies, we can feed them to the marine preds, who love a good molly chase. 
Now that may be how your store is run fero, but not all of them are run like this, many LFS near me (including big als aquariums and tung hoi) offer a baby tank and will raise the fry to in turn make a profit. They'll give you jack all for them(10cents a fish if livebearers, little more dependent on species) but if you have no way to care for them and the store will than I say why not just give them in?
I bet your oscar would eat live fish if it was given half a chance
I feed my dogs live food. Well actually they catch it and eat it but the same thing. My big dog catches/steals fish out of buckets when I am catching out stock to sell. She also hunts rats, mice, rabbits, birds, whatever she can. My small dog hunts insects and breaks their legs. But she can only do that to the big grasshoppers with long skinny legs. Otherwise they are too tough for her. She tried to kill a pigeon once. She sat on its back for about an hour trying to bite its head off. After an hour I picked her up off the bird and took the bird outside. It shook itself off and flew away covered in dog drool.
there's no way I would give my kids to a lion to eat. Hell no. I could get $20,000 each for them from a rich American couple.
ROFL
If you have a bunch of fry to get rid of and your LFS won’t take them, then do as Wilder suggested and ring a few more shops. You can also contact your local aquarium society or put an add in the local newspaper.
Most shops will take surplus fish if they are a reasonable size and they have space for them. Sometimes you have to wait a few days or a week before the shop has room but if you keep in contact with the shop then you can usually get rid of at least some of the fish.
This primarily applies to fish that are good sellers. If you ring the LFS and offer them 500 baby convicts they will take 10 if they have room and you get to keep the rest. One of the things my local cichlid society & I recommend to people breeding egg laying cichlids, is to keep the best 20 fry and feed the others off. Then you only have 20 fish to get rid of instead of hundreds.
I don’t feed live goldfish (from the LFS) to anything if I can help it because they are full of disease. However, home bred fry from goldfish, livebearers or cichlids that are unwanted, not a worry. I cull my stock heavily. If the fish isn’t perfect in every way, it goes. No second thoughts, no trying to justify the reason. I only keep the fittest and healthiest fry and kill anything that doesn’t measure up.
I even harvest fish eggs to feed to shrimp larvae. Now that might sound bad but most of the eggs would be left in the tank anyway and usually get eaten by the other fishes. And the eggs are normally taken from mixed species tanks so there is a possibility they could be hybrids anyway.
Further to that the shrimp I feed are getting harder to obtain and need to be bred in captivity. And until it is done on a regular basis the future wild stocks remain threatened. If sacrificing a few fry or eggs (from common species) in an effort to induce the successful breeding and rearing of more endangered species, then so be it.
On a final note, what is the difference between feeding off live fish to bigger fish, compared to feeding live foods like daphnia, insect larvae & worms to smaller fishes in an attempt to keep them well nourished and in prime condition for breeding? (to produce more fry to eat). And many people grow infusoria cultures to feed the fry.
And if you want to mix things up completely, people eat cows, sheep, pigs and chooks. The difference is we usually buy them pre-packaged from a supermarket, not wandering around a paddock.
I can take the opposite side of this as well. Any business thrives on return customers. This brings to mind the light bulb company that sold light bulbs that would never burn out. They were out of business in a couple of years, as anyone who wanted this product bought one, and since they never burned out the customers never returned for more.
This is one way of getting return customers. If the sales person informs the buyer that their trio of livebearers are bound to have fry, and if they do the shop will help them with another tank & such to raise them, they have just created a potential return, as well as another sale.
A quick talk on the fry needing to be one inch before bringing them back, and the shop either taking them off their hands with a pocketful of change thrown in, or directing them to someone who can makes for good customer service. Selling is just as much service as supplying a product, the service is what often creates return customers.
Read those last two paragraphs out loud, that is how long it will take the clerk to create a return sale. A thirty second chat creates the potential sale of a 20 long, air pump, sponge filter, and heater, as well as a customer that thinks that shop & clerk are their go to outfit for aquatics.
This is one way of getting return customers. If the sales person informs the buyer that their trio of livebearers are bound to have fry, and if they do the shop will help them with another tank & such to raise them, they have just created a potential return, as well as another sale.
A quick talk on the fry needing to be one inch before bringing them back, and the shop either taking them off their hands with a pocketful of change thrown in, or directing them to someone who can makes for good customer service. Selling is just as much service as supplying a product, the service is what often creates return customers.
Read those last two paragraphs out loud, that is how long it will take the clerk to create a return sale. A thirty second chat creates the potential sale of a 20 long, air pump, sponge filter, and heater, as well as a customer that thinks that shop & clerk are their go to outfit for aquatics.
DarkEntity
Eater Of The Fishies!!!
I have recently used feeder fish (guppys) for some Leaf Fish that I picked up that wouldn't all take dead foods. I have to say i really enjoyed watching them stalking their prey, it was very interesting to see the Leaf Fish slowly but surely coral their prey and then finally feed.
Feeders like guppys, mollys and other live bearers are a necessary part of fish keepign when you keep something slightly more unusual than the stock bread and butter fish that most people keep. Having said that i for the most part use dead foods and only swap to feeder fish when required.
Feeders like guppys, mollys and other live bearers are a necessary part of fish keepign when you keep something slightly more unusual than the stock bread and butter fish that most people keep. Having said that i for the most part use dead foods and only swap to feeder fish when required.
in my begining fish keeping I would save fry I found and take them to lfs, only to see the clerks dump the fry directly into a tank to be eaten, not even making sure I left the store.
now I let nature take its course, and every six months or so I might find one fry that grew up and didnt get eaten.
now I let nature take its course, and every six months or so I might find one fry that grew up and didnt get eaten.
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