LFS of Death

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I went to a local, major LFS chain, and I was shocked at what I saw. They installed new tanks about a month ago so I went in to see what they did. When I got there, it was impressive looking at first, but upon further inspection things went downhill fast. As I was browsing the fish, I noticed a couple dead ones stuck to a filter inlet, I figured this is going to happen at any LFS and continued on.

Then I noticed more and more dead fish and started counting. I stopped counting at 28 or so. It seemed like every tank had dead fish in it, but the worst was a chiclid tank and a shark tank. There was chiclids with white fuzz on them swimming around a dead one that looked like a white fuzzy ball in the tank. I mean, this fish was fuzzy. Then in a shark tank there was a ball of about 5 or 6 dead sharks floating in slow circles at the top of the tank while other fish swam around. This could not be an overnite thing.

A lot of tanks had dead fish with their eyes plucked out by other fish. I left the store. Others were noticing and commenting too. I dont know the behind the scenes operations of a LFS, but I would think the big filter for the tanks would spread this white fuzz around to all the tanks eventualy. Im not going to go back to find out.
 
Yeah changing over the tanks to a new system can sometimes be a mess in the stores. I know also if you go to a store on a new arrival day they tend to have alot of deaths. They get boxes and boxes of fish so if you happen by when the new fish were just placed you'll see all the ones that didn't make it through the shipping in good shape.

Every store I've ever seen has had there share of "bad days." However if that situation continues I'd agree and discontinue going there. I wouldn't count them fully out for 1 bad day though I certainly wouldn't purchase fish on that day. Give 'em a week or so and revisit and see how it looks then.
 
the store that i go to is a larger chain, they get new shipments in every thursday. They have a lot of dead fish in their tanks at that point, but that is still the best day to buy fish from there. Their fish sell fast, so if you wait 5-7 days to buy the fish, there is not much left to choose from, and a lot of the fish will have already been sold. I went in there today looking for a peacock eel, and they didn't even have any *they get their shipments on thursdays).

Go back in a week and see how it is then. If you have never had problems before, maybe it will be better in a week.
 
typically most places with giant filters, use UV filtration as well, so diseases arent usually spread.

which store was this?
 
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