[sihaya]

we need better care sheets for coral!

Green Brain Coral at PETCO

Since when are lobed brain corals "filter feeders?!?" LOL ::sigh:: You have to laugh to keep from crying...

[Ninong]

They have the same thing posted for all of their corals and anemones: Photosynthetic and filter feeder. I was looking to see if they had any sun polyps but they don't. They would probably have said the same thing about them, too.

I have found online vendors that refer to all their anemones as corals. One site that offered French Angels and Queen Angels listed their origin as Indo-Pacific. Some vendors list the Orchid Dottyback's origin as Indo-Pacific even though it is found only in the Red Sea. Right now Drs. Foster & Smith says their Passer Angels came from Mexico on the index page and then inside they say Central America. They probably think Mexico is in Central America.

Drs. Foster & Smith seems to have made an effort recently to clean up their act when it comes to identification. For example, they used to call the Lettuce Sea Slug (Elysia crispata) the Lettuce Nudibranch. Now they call it the Lettuce Sea Slug but they put the word Nudibranch in parentheses. They still list an invalid scientific name, Tridachia crispata, but then in the ad copy they point out that it is sometimes called Elysia crispata. That's because it's name is Elysia crispata and has been for several years now. And it has never been a nudibranch!

A few years back, right after they bought out PetWarehouse, I sent them an email pointing out about a dozen obvious errors on their website. At one time in the past they advertised some metal halide lamps as 10,000K even though they were 6500K. I told them they were wrong but they called me back, believe it or not, to tell me that they had checked with their lighting expert and that the cheapy 6500K lamps they were advertising as 10,000K were really 10,000K. They weren't, of course. They were marked as "daylight" by the manufacturer and their lighting expert told them that daylight was the same as 10,000K. It's not. They sold a lot of discounted 400w daylight metal halide lamps as 10,000K even though they were really 6500K. I sent them another nasty email with a link to the manufacturer's website proving that they weren't 10,000K and the next day they removed the 10,000K claim from their ad copy. They have done a lot better since the early days following their aquisition of PetWarehouse.

That's better than most vendors. Most vendors refuse to correct their incorrect names. One vendor, who used to be a sponsor on this board, told me that if she corrected the incorrect names that she uses on her website it would confuse her customers. Yeah, right. Using the correct names would confuse them!