D

DEEPWATER

Guest
Well i can say simon is a good guy ,may not know a whole alot in the hobby ,But he will work with you ,One thing i notices as well ,is the smoking over the tanks ,also wolrd class smoke next to the tanks and even saw them putout the cigg in the tank ,that world class ,can say about simon .But his store would be much better has lots of space to do thing with
But thats simon oh yeah ,i think he uses tap water as well ,Like ost of the LFS in brklyn .ans stress coat
 

GQ22

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sometimes i think the people at fish stores have no business being in the industry, i mean really how hard is it really to scoop a dying fish out of the tank. To run a fish store properly (as in maintaining the fish and corals) shouldnt take that much effort. if it were me i would be walking around all day looking at things and making things nice. i would be glad to do something like that. GET THE RIGHT SET UP, TAKE CARE OF YOUR LIVESTOCK, SET YOUR PRICES CHEAP!!. If you do these steps you'll have a successful fish store. COMMON SENSE!!!
 

Deanos

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Alfredo De La Fe said:
The best cure for ich is a cleaner shrimp.

Not true. First, not all fish like to get cleaned by cleaner shrimp. Also, the shrimp will not prevent the fish from getting re-infected once the ich cysts mature and reenter the water column.
 

Alfredo De La Fe

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Deanos:

At least 90% of the fish we keep in are tanks allow cleaner shrimp to clean them. Every reef "guru" I have ever met recommended cleaner shrimp. I used to have the problem of fish dying within a week or two because of ich (All fish carry it and it is in MOST of our systems, kind of like a cold- fish become susceptible to it when stressed)

When I added cleaner shrimp to my tank I stopped losing fish. They would come down with ich, but would recover. Every single person I have made this recommendation to has had the same exact results, once they added cleaner shrimp their fish would survive ich, without them they would not.

As for a store, one of my first jobs out of High School was for a pet shop. It is not as easy as you would think. Going through the points made above:

1. Get the right setup - The "right" setup is very expensive and most new stores could not afford to do it "right". Second, the right setup for your aquarium at home is not necessarily the right one for a store. Stores do a considerable amount of volume and every system is basically considered a quarantine tank.

2. Take care of your livestock - I agree. As long as the setup is adequate the only real concern in taking care of livestock is proper aclimation and maintenance.

3. Set your prices cheap - This is very tricky. If prices are too cheap stores lose money and go out of business. Besides VERY high rents for a store front in the tri-state area (Minimum of $4,000 per month) it is inevitable that stuff dies on arrival, while in a dealers tank and during transport. A very conservative estimate is that 25% of livestock will not make it. Not to mention stuff that does not do very well and has to be marked down below cost. (A coral that loses half of it's polyps, etc.)

Remember, most fish for stores spend less than a week in any one place. Usually they arrive at LA after spending as much as 48-72 hours in transit and at customs in tiny little bags with barely enough water to cover them, they are repacked with fresh water right away or put in holding tanks overnight and repacked the next morning (Holding tanks usually have less than ideal parameters), shipped to the wholeseller the next day or a day later at most for 99% of the livestock and once at the wholeseller they are put in other holding tanks where most of the inventory sells within a day or two and at most a week. Once the store owner buys it it is then REACCLIMATED in their store and sold anywhere from the same day to two weeks later.

The animals you buy have been put through SERIOUS stress. They have been caught, held in buckets for hours, bagged in less than ideal conditions, and have had their water changed a minimum of 5 times with less than ideal quality water each time. It is a miracle that they survive at all.

-Alfred
 

Alfredo De La Fe

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BTW: I used to do transhipping, wholesale and a little retail to friends until my biggest customer that would order weekly stiffed me for a $5,000 order.

Most stores are marking things up from 100-300%. The problem is that for them to really survive the markup should be 300-500% on livestock, they need to make a decent markup on drygoods (which the internet has really taken a big chunk of their business) and they need to sell dry goods for other types of pets. (Most stores make the majority of their money on cat and dog food!) The fish only store is seriously hurting these days.

-Alfred
 

Deanos

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Alfredo De La Fe said:
Deanos:

At least 90% of the fish we keep in are tanks allow cleaner shrimp to clean them. Every reef "guru" I have ever met recommended cleaner shrimp. I used to have the problem of fish dying within a week or two because of ich (All fish carry it and it is in MOST of our systems, kind of like a cold- fish become susceptible to it when stressed)

When I added cleaner shrimp to my tank I stopped losing fish. They would come down with ich, but would recover. Every single person I have made this recommendation to has had the same exact results, once they added cleaner shrimp their fish would survive ich, without them they would not.

I have no doubt cleaner shrimp will aid in the recover from ich. My dispute is your claim that it is the "best cure". While I'm not a fish guru, I am a link guru. The links provided on this page lean towards hyposalinity and copper as proven methods of beating ich. In fact, in this article, cleaner shrimp are listed as treatment option #11.

In my tank, your 90% rule drops to 13% as my Blue Hippo is the only fish which allows cleanings. :wink1:
 

GQ22

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i agree it prob takes a little more money than i imagined, but:

1) dont use floruscents over corals as some fish stores do, just get t5 for softies and halides for hard corals (dont skimp on this cost as it will make everything better)
2) clean the skimmers
3) scoop out dead fish
4) sell corals of the same type in the same tank
5) have all coral water flow into a one massive refugium with lots of algae
6) acclimate properly (ive seen lfs just dump in)

i dont doubt its hard, but the neglegience and effort i see given on these remedial task could be rectified pretty easily. i drop the 2 g's on multiple little t5's on the initial setup, hire a plumber for a g to plumb everything properly and your all set. Am i missing anything else or is this really not that difficult?
 

marrone

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Alfredo De La Fe said:
Deanos:

Every reef "guru" I have ever met recommended cleaner shrimp.
-Alfred


Funny this is just the opposite of any conversion I've ever had with any "guru". The only people that seem to recommend them are usually a LFS that are trying to sell them. Like Dean said a lot of fish don't like to be cleaned by them, they also will take off scales or just irritate the fish more.
 

Alfredo De La Fe

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Most of the other treatment recommendations for ich are inappropriate for a reef aquarium or simply ineffective. I have kept tangs, anthias, cardinals, angels and damsels. All of which were cleaned by the shrimp. Most of them would "line up" for cleaning either during the day or when the lights went out.

From personal experience and the experience of every advanced aquarist I have ever met (All of which were authors of Aquarium Frontiers articles as well as popular books) Lysmata cleaner shrimp are by far the best control. First of all, they help control the spread of ich by reducing the pathogen load. (Ich is "spread" primarily two waysin our aquariums: Dropping off of the fish to the substrate as cysts and via fecal matter), two, it reduces the stress and pathogen load in the fish itself allowing the immune system of the fish to get control of the situation. By reducing the load, a healthy reeftank should reduce the load even further via corals feeding and skimming.

UV Sterilizers are very ineffective because the contact time of the organism with the UV is too short and the output of most of the UV units in the hobby are way to low.

Chemicals- Reefs in nature are very delicate environments. Our enclosed "reef environments" are even more delicate and considerably less forgiving. The use of chemicals and antibiotics can cause a whole bunch of other problems ranging from high phospates and nitrates (From the dieoff) to cynobacterial blooms.

I have to go to work, but when I have a chance I will write up something more detailed.

-Alfred
 

alrha

...
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Alfredo De La Fe said:
irregardless
is that a word?
FWIW, i have a few cleaner shrimp in my tank, and my tangs love them. They even open up their gills and their mouths to get internal cleanings as well.
IMO, if i fish doesnt like it, he can just swim away.
 
Last edited:

nycmat

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hey guys just remember one thing here. simon did a special order for this guy who says he is a manhatttan reefer, lets not forget what this guy does for a living and he makes a special order for one of us. that is a good thing. he did what the guy asked and held it in his system. he didnt have to. this guys sun- anthias developed ich yeah but there are so many variables there with ich. who is to say that this guys conditions in his tank wasnt good? not knocking him but it is a possibility. i have had many encounters with simon but none bad. he has done right by me regarding my scribble angel and i will defend that to the end.

yes we should always quarantee everything. also cleaners work but so do cleaner wrasses and that is cool to watch if you never saw it done. yeah maybe he uses tap water like roman said but i never saw any go into his reef tank
 

Alfredo De La Fe

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cali_reef said:
I have cleaner shrimps in my fish only tank and only 3-4 out of 25 or so fish gets cleaned by them. My cleaner wreasse goes after more fish IME.

You will rarely see cleaner shrimp doing their "job" unless you have a real serious problem. When I first got them it was at the recommendation of one of the pioneers of captive reef keeping. My fish were "goners", seconds after the shrimp were added, the fish were LITERALLY in line waiting to be cleaned!

One other point that I was reminded of from one of the other posters:

Cleaner shrimp will clean the eyes and gills. One of the primary reasons that fish die from ich is because they are unable to "breathe".

Also, cleaner wrasses are very cool, but very rarely live once ich is gone because the refuse to eat anything else.

Before joining the Brooklyn Aquarium Society and meeting some awesome people I tried everything from Malachite Green, UV, copper, fresh water dips. They all failed miserably until I was recommended the cleaner shrimp.

Regards,

-Alfred
 

Alfredo De La Fe

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alrha said:
is that a word?
FWIW, i have a few cleaner shrimp in my tank, and my tangs love them. They even open up their gills and their mouths to get internal cleanings as well.
IMO, if i fish doesnt like it, he can just swim away.

Yes and no. ;-) Not a word I would use formally.

From dictionary.com:

"Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so."
 

marrone

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Alfredo De La Fe said:
You will rarely see cleaner shrimp doing their "job" unless you have a real serious problem. When I first got them it was at the recommendation of one of the pioneers of captive reef keeping. My fish were "goners", seconds after the shrimp were added, the fish were LITERALLY in line waiting to be cleaned!

Fish will go up to cleaner shrimp and look to get cleaned unlike cleaner wrasses that will go up to the fish to do cleaning. Some fish will not go up to cleaner shrimp, even if they're cover in ich, and some fish will actually eat them which some times happens with cleaner wrasses also. So it's hit or miss with cleaner shrimp.

Alfredo De La Fe said:
Also, cleaner wrasses are very cool, but very rarely live once ich is gone because the refuse to eat anything else.

This is usually true though some take to eating food and can actually last about 1 year or so. They also eat scales and skin from the fish so it's just not only ich and parasites they're eating off of the the fish. You can see this when a fish either pulls back from a cleaner wrasse of will even go after it and chase it away.

Alfredo De La Fe said:
Before joining the Brooklyn Aquarium Society and meeting some awesome people I tried everything from Malachite Green, UV, copper, fresh water dips. They all failed miserably until I was recommended the cleaner shrimp.

Copper works very well, probably the best of the treatment available, but you need a good test kit. Hyposailty work very well but you need to make sure that first you have ich, other wise it wouldn't work, and that you have a refactor-meter to measure the SG correctly. Fresh water dips don't do the job and a fresh water bath would be better but that wouldn't cure the fish of the ich just get rid of some of it. Similar with Cleaner shrimp they're aren't going to get rid of all the ich and your taking a chance that the fish will eventually die. Using cleaner shrimp, cleaner wrasse and other fish that do cleaning is an old method, that can work some times but most of the time not. It can get some of the ich spores off of the fish and then if the fish is healty enough it may figh off the remaining ich and make it. But there are better methods to be used then cleaner shrimp specially if you can remove the fish from the tank.
 

Alfredo De La Fe

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marrone said:
Fish will go up to cleaner shrimp and look to get cleaned unlike cleaner wrasses that will go up to the fish to do cleaning. Some fish will not go up to cleaner shrimp, even if they're cover in ich, and some fish will actually eat them which some times happens with cleaner wrasses also. So it's hit or miss with cleaner shrimp...

Copper works very well, probably the best of the treatment available.

That is why I don't consider certain fish to be truly reef safe. ;-) A reeftank without cleaner shrimp means that you have to be very careful adding new fish for fear of spreading ich. (Even if you use a QT the fish may confront agression and develop ich because of the stress.)

As for copper, there are MANY fish that suffer long term effects if exposed to copper. Ever wonder why some fish seem to wither away? It was very popular to blame it on cyanide, but I suspect that some instances are caused by copper in the shops fish only systems. Why do I suspect this? Because I have seen fish that were previously thriving get treated with copper and eventually waste away from malnutrition.

I am going to make a post on Reef Central, I am now very curious if any actual studies have been done on the effects of copper on reef fish.

-Alfred
 

Chiefmcfuz

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Plain and simple, Ich happens and Cleaner shrimp are cool that's why I keep them. Cleaner wrasses and neon gobies are cool too if I had more room I would get some of them. There is no way you can guarantee that a fish will not get ich but you can make every effort in your quarantine process to try and cure it if it does happen. And there is no way to be sure when you go from the QTT to the Show tank that it won't get ich again! In other words you hope you bought a strong specimin and it will not be stressed out so much to get ich or other stress related diseases.
 

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