TwoTankAmin
Fish Connoisseur
I am getting ready to post on a number of fish sites, even those I will rarely post on. The topic is the hidden danger regarding the bags used to ship fish.
Basically, some of these can and do leech nasty stuff into the bag water.
This is a bit of a long tale but I think it needs to be that way to have it make sense. I am recounting these experiences as much to determine if they are happening to anybody else as well as for getting feedback from folks.
Let me begin with a short amount o background info. I have been keeping fish since Jan 2001. In that time I have had many spawns in my tanks which includes every species of pleco I have kept. From 2003 through Catcon I have likely sold over 500 common tank bristlenose. Since Feb. 2007 I have sold about 400 FI zebra plecos, about 100 L450, about 100 H contrdens and a bunch of other assorted plecos and I have just begun with l236 offspring. I would think over the years I have easily bagged well over 1,000 fish of all kinds but mostly plecos. I had lost only one zebra being bagged in all that time and that one I dinged when catching it and thought it was not injured. Turned out it was and it is the only zebra I ever bagged that did not reach its destination alive until this past 10 months.
I have my own private well with super water. I have digital monitors as well. I am able to and have regularly put water directly from the tap into tanks and used it to bag fish. When I bag fish I pull tanks apart removing the contents to water filled containers. The water is all from my tap and during the netting process I will also take the opportunity to do a good vac. So I refill the tanks when done. I fill my fish use only buckets and larger containers with water and I use the same water to bag the fish and to refill tanks.
With the exception of the summer after 911 when a number of bn shipments arrived DOA, I have lost very few fish in bags whether shipped or transported by individuals.Back then I chalked it up to a potentially "bad" spawn or how the USPO was dealing with boxes to insure they would not explode. Now I am not so sure.
Last year I was a room seller at CatCon. I brought a large number of fish to sell, especially plecos. I ordered a lot of bags in advance of the event. Having used many of them up that weekend, I reordered bags not long after.
When I arrived at the event less than 24 hours after bagging fish, I began to put things into tanks and discovered a number of dead plecos to include some P compta, an L450 and a couple of zebras. Because I had bagged so many fish getting ready, I assumed I might have done something wrong to cause the deaths. For the return trip I repeated the process, this time with dechlored hotel water, the same water the fish spent the convention in. Once again the fish were bagged for under a 24 hours. When I arrived home I had more dead fish. All the rummy nose tetras, and an assortment of plecos to include a few 236 and zebras.
Fast forward to the NEC weekend this past March. At this event I decided to sell out of the vendor room. This time life was easier as it was under a 90 minute drive. To this event I brought plecos, and had delivered from a well know seller a number of Amano shrimp, assorted Nerite snails, rummy nose tetras and Hasbrosus cory. I lost almost nothing on the way to the show, but then the fish were not in their bags very long. However, things which I sold and bagged and were then taken to the room of the buyer started to die over night. In addition the redline barb tank appeared to crash and they died over the 1st night when I was back home. Corys were brought back with a few dead and the rest doing badly. I had a another vendor replace them from his stock and paid for them. Because the time in bags was short in both directions, pleco losses were small, another zebra and a 236.
Fast forward to this weekend and the ACA event. Working with a well known seller and on my own we presented 14 zebra plecos. % ot these were from my f1 adult tank, the other from two different growout tanks. All the fish were bagged individually. Also there was one bag with 2 L236 at 1.5 inch and a bag 2 with 3 L450s of a similar size. All were well bagged in clean new water with nothing added but a small piece of Poly-Filter fiber. The fish were bagged Thursday morning between 9:30 am and 1:30 pm, taken at about 2:30 and at the event by about 5. The 5 adult zebras were collected that evening and unbagged into a tank in the buyer's room. Friday morning at about 10:30 I got a call from the person handling my fish, the buyer for the other 9 zebras had arrived and when the styro was opened, all of the 4 biggest (1.75+ inch) zebras were dead. The 5 smaller ones were still alive as were the 236 and 450s. However, it was agreed the fish should immediately be rebagged. The bags were from another supplier and the water was now dechlored hotel water. I told the buyer to take the five fish and if they lived in his tanks for at least a week we would settle up. On the way home one of the five fish died. he reported the other 4 went to cover as soon as they went into his tank.
That evening I heard from my associate at the hotel. One of the 236 in the new bags had died, Only the L450s were still intact. I was also informed the 4/5 F1 adult zebra plecos in the buyers' tank had died overnight. I refunded their money.
Now here are all of the sort of details one might want to know about:
1. I have used my tap water untreated since day one in the hobby and never had issues in tanks or bags until recently.
2. I store bags as they came packaged, I further put them into plastic bags like one gets for their groceries and then into an open box in the storage area where I have two inwall tanks running.
3. I normally ship with a small amount of Amquel in the bag water. This last time i chose not to use any Amquel instead adding a small piece of Poly-Filter.
4. For both of the above events I brought cycled filters for all the display/sales tanks. I maintain a small bio-farm to jeep additional filters cycled and ready to use.
5. I will dump my bag water into the show tanks when the trip is short.
6. For the NEC event I brought my own tank water using my normal RO/di storage containers.
7. I use heat packs as needed and tend not to ship during the Thanksgiving (USA) and New year period. I will never ship when its extremely hot.
8. Since I got two orders of bags on top of the one's I already had, and because I tend to mix them easily, I have no way to associate any bag with any specific purchase.
9. On a fair price basis for the sale amount for my F1s and the other fish I purchased for resale, I have now lost over $4,000 worth of fish.
All of the deaths I am discussing here clearly happened in relation to fish being bagged in my bags. It appears that the longer the fish are in the bags, the more that die in them and the more that may have still survive have died after being unbagged or rebagged in different bags and water. So I have two issues that I would like to have some input on from folks with a decent amount of experience with shipped fish.
First, does anybody see any other reasonable explanation besides contamination from the bags?
Second, this problem seems to happen for me mostly, but not exclusively with sucker mouth cats. Since these fish tend to suck onto the bag during transport, is it possible that may be an important factor? Might the fish be causing the release of chemicals or some form of breakdown in the bag integrity which greatly exacerbates the potential for chemical issues to occur by sucking on and/or rasping the bags?
I have brainstormed this problem with several people and we all keep coming back to the same thing, its the bags. The upshot is I am throwing out all of my current stock of bags and replacing them from a different supplier. I have related most of this information to the vendor from whom I bought the bags. I know he is on a road trip, so I do not expect an answer from him until later next week. I believe the vendor is not directly responsible for the problems if it is indeed the bags.
Edit: There is a July 9 article on the subject of killer fish bags which only deals with saltwater fish. It reported in Amazonas/Reef to Rainforest here http
/www.reef2rainforest.com/2015/07/17/delving-into-fish-shipping-bag-toxic-plastic-concerns/
I have reached out to the corresponding author to aks if they have any data on fw fish in bags or plans to investigate. I mentioned the idea that the sucker mouth fish may cause or exacerbate the release of chemicals. If and when I hear back I will report this.
It contains my personal experiences, links to recent scientific research on this subject and an article/interview with the one of the authors of the paper. Here are a few of the details:
1. The organization doing the research is non-profit. The research was undertaken because one of the researchers is friends with somebody in the fish business who has suffered some serious losses over the years.
2. I contacted the author over the weekend and got a nice reply back.
3. I talked by phone with SeaChem today regarding their new bag for retail stores. I doesn't contain the offending chemical.
4. I contacted another vendor who specializes in fish room supplies and chatted with them. I ordered bags from them to replace those I had to throw out. I chose them on the advice of somebody who had a similar experience with the vendor I have always used and who switched suppliers and has not had further issues.
5. The scariest part of this all is that often it takes a fish about a week after being in "contaminated" bag water before it dies. Therefore, most people will never suspect the real cause of fish losses shortly after they go into a tank. However, losses during shipping are quite common as well.
6. It appears as if the problem way be exacerbated when shipping plecos.
If you read the thread and are interested, i would like to hear how you think we can spread the word and then apply pressure on the bag makers vie the people from whom we buy our bags to push them to make safer bags.
And and all comments, thoughts and suggestions are welcome in this thread.
Also for those interested in this topic to you can read my thread on Planet Catfish - Shipping Bags & Fish Dying
If you would like to read the original research, you can find the full paper here http/www.haereticu...osphere2015.pdf
If you want to know about the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory you can visit their site here http/www.haereticus-lab.org/
Basically, some of these can and do leech nasty stuff into the bag water.
This is a bit of a long tale but I think it needs to be that way to have it make sense. I am recounting these experiences as much to determine if they are happening to anybody else as well as for getting feedback from folks.
Let me begin with a short amount o background info. I have been keeping fish since Jan 2001. In that time I have had many spawns in my tanks which includes every species of pleco I have kept. From 2003 through Catcon I have likely sold over 500 common tank bristlenose. Since Feb. 2007 I have sold about 400 FI zebra plecos, about 100 L450, about 100 H contrdens and a bunch of other assorted plecos and I have just begun with l236 offspring. I would think over the years I have easily bagged well over 1,000 fish of all kinds but mostly plecos. I had lost only one zebra being bagged in all that time and that one I dinged when catching it and thought it was not injured. Turned out it was and it is the only zebra I ever bagged that did not reach its destination alive until this past 10 months.
I have my own private well with super water. I have digital monitors as well. I am able to and have regularly put water directly from the tap into tanks and used it to bag fish. When I bag fish I pull tanks apart removing the contents to water filled containers. The water is all from my tap and during the netting process I will also take the opportunity to do a good vac. So I refill the tanks when done. I fill my fish use only buckets and larger containers with water and I use the same water to bag the fish and to refill tanks.
With the exception of the summer after 911 when a number of bn shipments arrived DOA, I have lost very few fish in bags whether shipped or transported by individuals.Back then I chalked it up to a potentially "bad" spawn or how the USPO was dealing with boxes to insure they would not explode. Now I am not so sure.
Last year I was a room seller at CatCon. I brought a large number of fish to sell, especially plecos. I ordered a lot of bags in advance of the event. Having used many of them up that weekend, I reordered bags not long after.
When I arrived at the event less than 24 hours after bagging fish, I began to put things into tanks and discovered a number of dead plecos to include some P compta, an L450 and a couple of zebras. Because I had bagged so many fish getting ready, I assumed I might have done something wrong to cause the deaths. For the return trip I repeated the process, this time with dechlored hotel water, the same water the fish spent the convention in. Once again the fish were bagged for under a 24 hours. When I arrived home I had more dead fish. All the rummy nose tetras, and an assortment of plecos to include a few 236 and zebras.
Fast forward to the NEC weekend this past March. At this event I decided to sell out of the vendor room. This time life was easier as it was under a 90 minute drive. To this event I brought plecos, and had delivered from a well know seller a number of Amano shrimp, assorted Nerite snails, rummy nose tetras and Hasbrosus cory. I lost almost nothing on the way to the show, but then the fish were not in their bags very long. However, things which I sold and bagged and were then taken to the room of the buyer started to die over night. In addition the redline barb tank appeared to crash and they died over the 1st night when I was back home. Corys were brought back with a few dead and the rest doing badly. I had a another vendor replace them from his stock and paid for them. Because the time in bags was short in both directions, pleco losses were small, another zebra and a 236.
Fast forward to this weekend and the ACA event. Working with a well known seller and on my own we presented 14 zebra plecos. % ot these were from my f1 adult tank, the other from two different growout tanks. All the fish were bagged individually. Also there was one bag with 2 L236 at 1.5 inch and a bag 2 with 3 L450s of a similar size. All were well bagged in clean new water with nothing added but a small piece of Poly-Filter fiber. The fish were bagged Thursday morning between 9:30 am and 1:30 pm, taken at about 2:30 and at the event by about 5. The 5 adult zebras were collected that evening and unbagged into a tank in the buyer's room. Friday morning at about 10:30 I got a call from the person handling my fish, the buyer for the other 9 zebras had arrived and when the styro was opened, all of the 4 biggest (1.75+ inch) zebras were dead. The 5 smaller ones were still alive as were the 236 and 450s. However, it was agreed the fish should immediately be rebagged. The bags were from another supplier and the water was now dechlored hotel water. I told the buyer to take the five fish and if they lived in his tanks for at least a week we would settle up. On the way home one of the five fish died. he reported the other 4 went to cover as soon as they went into his tank.
That evening I heard from my associate at the hotel. One of the 236 in the new bags had died, Only the L450s were still intact. I was also informed the 4/5 F1 adult zebra plecos in the buyers' tank had died overnight. I refunded their money.
Now here are all of the sort of details one might want to know about:
1. I have used my tap water untreated since day one in the hobby and never had issues in tanks or bags until recently.
2. I store bags as they came packaged, I further put them into plastic bags like one gets for their groceries and then into an open box in the storage area where I have two inwall tanks running.
3. I normally ship with a small amount of Amquel in the bag water. This last time i chose not to use any Amquel instead adding a small piece of Poly-Filter.
4. For both of the above events I brought cycled filters for all the display/sales tanks. I maintain a small bio-farm to jeep additional filters cycled and ready to use.
5. I will dump my bag water into the show tanks when the trip is short.
6. For the NEC event I brought my own tank water using my normal RO/di storage containers.
7. I use heat packs as needed and tend not to ship during the Thanksgiving (USA) and New year period. I will never ship when its extremely hot.
8. Since I got two orders of bags on top of the one's I already had, and because I tend to mix them easily, I have no way to associate any bag with any specific purchase.
9. On a fair price basis for the sale amount for my F1s and the other fish I purchased for resale, I have now lost over $4,000 worth of fish.
All of the deaths I am discussing here clearly happened in relation to fish being bagged in my bags. It appears that the longer the fish are in the bags, the more that die in them and the more that may have still survive have died after being unbagged or rebagged in different bags and water. So I have two issues that I would like to have some input on from folks with a decent amount of experience with shipped fish.
First, does anybody see any other reasonable explanation besides contamination from the bags?
Second, this problem seems to happen for me mostly, but not exclusively with sucker mouth cats. Since these fish tend to suck onto the bag during transport, is it possible that may be an important factor? Might the fish be causing the release of chemicals or some form of breakdown in the bag integrity which greatly exacerbates the potential for chemical issues to occur by sucking on and/or rasping the bags?
I have brainstormed this problem with several people and we all keep coming back to the same thing, its the bags. The upshot is I am throwing out all of my current stock of bags and replacing them from a different supplier. I have related most of this information to the vendor from whom I bought the bags. I know he is on a road trip, so I do not expect an answer from him until later next week. I believe the vendor is not directly responsible for the problems if it is indeed the bags.
Edit: There is a July 9 article on the subject of killer fish bags which only deals with saltwater fish. It reported in Amazonas/Reef to Rainforest here http
/www.reef2rainforest.com/2015/07/17/delving-into-fish-shipping-bag-toxic-plastic-concerns/I have reached out to the corresponding author to aks if they have any data on fw fish in bags or plans to investigate. I mentioned the idea that the sucker mouth fish may cause or exacerbate the release of chemicals. If and when I hear back I will report this.
It contains my personal experiences, links to recent scientific research on this subject and an article/interview with the one of the authors of the paper. Here are a few of the details:
1. The organization doing the research is non-profit. The research was undertaken because one of the researchers is friends with somebody in the fish business who has suffered some serious losses over the years.
2. I contacted the author over the weekend and got a nice reply back.
3. I talked by phone with SeaChem today regarding their new bag for retail stores. I doesn't contain the offending chemical.
4. I contacted another vendor who specializes in fish room supplies and chatted with them. I ordered bags from them to replace those I had to throw out. I chose them on the advice of somebody who had a similar experience with the vendor I have always used and who switched suppliers and has not had further issues.
5. The scariest part of this all is that often it takes a fish about a week after being in "contaminated" bag water before it dies. Therefore, most people will never suspect the real cause of fish losses shortly after they go into a tank. However, losses during shipping are quite common as well.
6. It appears as if the problem way be exacerbated when shipping plecos.
If you read the thread and are interested, i would like to hear how you think we can spread the word and then apply pressure on the bag makers vie the people from whom we buy our bags to push them to make safer bags.
And and all comments, thoughts and suggestions are welcome in this thread.
Also for those interested in this topic to you can read my thread on Planet Catfish - Shipping Bags & Fish Dying
If you would like to read the original research, you can find the full paper here http
/www.haereticu...osphere2015.pdfIf you want to know about the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory you can visit their site here http
/www.haereticus-lab.org/
