[Firefish]

My wife and I were going to go to a new steak house a few towns over tonight, notice I said "were". There was a 90 minute wait to eat so to kill time we took a walk over to PetSmart to check out the live stock, anyways... As we're looking over the salt water section we shook our head in disgust, we counted about 20 Yellow and Blue Tangs, all about 3"-4" in size cramped into a 40 gallon tank To make it worse they had a poor little Mandarin Dragonett (sp?) on the plain glass bottom I asked them how long he'd been in there for and she said for a couple of days. Acting like nothing was wrong I asked what one would feed them and how easy they are to keep. She said frozen brine and flakes, and they are easy to keep! So I bought the little fella, figuring he'd not eaten in a few days and he'd be in fishie heaven in my 155 bow front with about 175 lbs of rock and all the live food he could eat. We didn't get to eat our steak but I finally got a Mandarin Dragonett

[mastaJ]

Its cool that you got a dragonet but if the store doesn't know how to take care of it i wouldn't buy it. Just think of how many manderins that they kill so if ppl buy them they will countinue to sell them...done venting

BTW, how is he doing?

[David]

I don't think you can really consider Petsmart as an lfs, they are a mass marketer of discount pet suplies, livestock and related items and only respond to consumer demand at regional (or higher) levels. Boycotting your local Petsmart will have about as much effect as refusing to use the restroom at a Shell station just outside of town. If you actually care you can get to know the manager, he probably knows less about salt water fish , corals and inverts than you did before you got your first tank. (He knows a lot about dog food and cat toys, that's why they made him manager) Again, if you actually care, the guy will most likely appreciate any help you can give him and may actually be able to influence the district manager and beyond and ultimately may be able to influence the buying decisions. It's a long shot but I have been working on this very thing in my area, it's just such a shame to see animals so destined to perish simply because they are easy to sell to the uneducated or unprepared..

[eses]

A fish from petsmart? I hope you quarantined it. The local petsmart here is the biggest, sickest place I've seen. Mine carries weird hardware parts like impellers, etc, so I stopped in one day in the morning to get one; noticed they had just gotten a stock of fish in, bunch of boxes sitting unopened that had fish in them. Neat, I thought, I'll come back later today and see what they have.

I stopped by that night, they hadn't unpacked the boxes yet. I asked the girl there if those really had fish in them still, and she says "yeah, the fish person didn't come in today so she'll put out the new stock tomorrow, if you come back then new stuff will be out."

aiyiyi.

Hope he does well for you.. I'm sure it is a much happier fish now, something you may want to try as it worked for two I've had is using raw shrimp as food. Cut a small piece, mush it up pretty well in your fingers, and dust near the fish with it. Mine sucked it up really well and made for a good supplement food.

[Firefish]

He seems to be doing well. I have a hundreds if not thousands of those little pod things they like to eat. Two strange things though...1st, My female clarkie swam up to him, kinda checked him out for a few minutes, not hostile or anything but then she opened her mouth as wide as I've ever seen and wraped it around the dragonets body! but it was gentle and the dragonet didn't seem to care then she just swam away, maybe she was wondering if it was food or a fish?? She hasn't bothered him at all after that...2nd, about an hour after the lights went out I checked on the dragonet, it's color was changed from the dark greens and blues to light grey His color was normal again today and he looked pretty happy. Realy neat how they just hover in the middle of the water. Mastaj, I agree with you but if I can save one from being killed then I will. I'm going to write PetSmart a letter and see where that gets me...