Importing Fish

ChrissyBoy · Oct 31, 2011

I spent all day yesterday visiting the various tropshops in my locality and I'm starting to get bored of seeing the same old fish. They all seem to have a mixture of mollys, platys, guppies, tetras, danios, barbs etc and there is never anything different really.

I was just wondering whether anyone knows any good websites that are not wholesalers or anywhere I'm able to import some fish that you can't buy in a LFS.

Cheers!

micko · Oct 31, 2011

Have you asked these LFS's if they'd order fish in for you?
I have to do a 2hour round trip to get any fish I want.

ZoddyZod · Oct 31, 2011

I think Wildwoods offer a mail order service. Visited them last weekend and they had some great and fairly unique SA imports on offer.

There are a few reputable sellers on eBay. Kesgrave is one I can mention.

KittyKat · Oct 31, 2011

I can recommend Trimar, they're in UK and ship fish; I've used them before and they were good.

As for importing, if it's from within the EU and for freshwater tropical fish, it is very easy, but extremely costly (for example, 3-4 fish boxes cost me around 250 pounds from Berlin to Heathrow last time I sent fish over and then some airlines insist on vet certificates, which are around 70 pounds over here) unless you drive over yourself in a van and bring back a van full of fish (no vets fees, transport cost is only the van, man and fuel). If it's from outside the EU, it's complicated because of the vet fees, import licence and certificates that are needed.

the_lock_man · Oct 31, 2011

Have a look on aquarist-classifieds.co.uk, there are a number of sellers on there who offer mail order.

Or you could really jump in at the deep-end, and go to Aquabid.com - kind of like a specialist aquarium Ebay. Any sellers there with a little globe icon are happy to ship worldwide - but it costs £30+ to actually do the import thing, on top of the cost of the actual fish.

Jay-93 · Oct 31, 2011

ZoddyZod said:
I think Wildwoods offer a mail order service. Visited them last weekend and they had some great and fairly unique SA imports on offer.

There are a few reputable sellers on eBay. Kesgrave is one I can mention.

I've shopped using Kesgrave aquatics before.

Despite them having some very interesting fish, the pictures they use are FAR from what actually arrive. The fish are healthy enough, but after that I'm highly reluctant to buy a fish online unless the actual fish is shown in the item list.