Pacu Rant

[confusion]

So, I've been spending way too much time at petsmart lately. I've noticed that they've been getting new types of fish in lately, and one that is pretty disturbing is pacu. 3 petsmart stores around me all very small pacu - maybe 1.5" or so. They have bunches of them in a small tank that is subdivided. I don't recall the exact price, but I think they're under $10.

Then I read this: http/www.clickondetroit.com/news/13929662/detail.html

I can see it: look honey - pacu! they would look great with my guppies! Once the guppies and the token pleco are eaten, the pacu gets carried in a bucket out to the lake and thrown in. What a shock!

Everybody seems to get really angry with petshops that blindly let people buy fish, and at sometimes those same people get offended when the clerk asks what kind of tank they have. But, there are some cases where fish need to have warning labels.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Yeah it is a real shame that such fish get sold so unconcernedly by so many staff in lfs, IMO the vast majority of such tank busting fish probably end up in aquariums or ponds far too small for them and the fish end up dying miserable deaths.

Another problem is that people do not realise the strength of these fish when they get larger- a guy i know on another forum had a disaster recently, when two of his full grown pacu's who were in a temporary tank of a couple of hundred gallons, the pacu's spooked, slamming themselves into the side of the tank and breaking the glass! They are very heavy strong tough fish.

When i am able to do my big indoor pond project in the near future, if i can do a pond large enough i would like to adopt unwanted tankbusting fish like pacu's .