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A Terrible Fish Article

We're having a good laugh and this article is egregious. But truth is, there is a *lot* of bad information out there online in articles written by probably well meaning people.
 
GaryE said:
It isn't THAT long ago that I went to a US chain and saw a care sticker suggesting Pacus for a 10 gallon tank. Pacus can be over a metre and 40 kilos as adults... Stores sell Oscars and Jack Dempsies as mainstream offerings, with common plecos, Bala sharks, and many other fish that outgrow tanks. So maybe this article isn't so far off the sources many of us have chosen to buy fish from because they're cheaper there?

Maybe the research was a stack of Petwhatever care stickers from the 00s?

@speakerman3 China is a major consumer of aquarium products, much more dynamic than in North America. They are where things are happening. But the actual production isn't there - they buy from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand - just like the west does. They buy a lot of blood parrot, flowerhorn and modified fish, and influence the farm output that way.
Click to expand...
I was just in a big box pet store and saw some Chinese algae eaters for sale there. I wondered if people who bought them really knew what they were getting.
 
sharkweek178 said:
I was just in a big box pet store and saw some Chinese algae eaters for sale there. I wondered if people who bought them really knew what they were getting.
Click to expand...
Even more interesting is whether the people in the store, even managing it, knew what they were selling. It's common in the business to refer to fish as units, and to look at unit sales. By calling those nasty fish 'algae eaters', they sell. They become "CAE units", and they move out well. For the companies running the stores, they are dirt cheap fish - much cheaper than fish that really eat algae are.
A classic is the Jack Dempsey, an interesting fish for an experienced keep with quite large tanks. They have enormous broods of babies, and that makes them very cheap indeed. In a lot of low quality stores, they turn over many units of JDs weekly, and so a fish that wrecks a beginner's tank and then dies is a staple, bread and butter fish in the trade. They possibly consider that more experienced, longer term customers won't remain their customers, so what their offerings do to the hobbyists doesn't matter. Once you've learned not to kill your fish, you don't need fish and equipment often anyway.
Some chains have done detailed market research on which 'units' sell best when placed beside which other 'units', and they have the sales down to a science. They also study which dry goods sell where, etc. No difference is made. They sometimes hire knowledgeable students or young aquarists. I was in a local box store and the woman there saw I knew what I was doing, and asked me a few questions. She then quietly, almost whispering, told me where the independent stores were, and suggested I shop there instead. She said "You're new in town. You aren't stuck with these stores. You have better options for fish and plants nearby."
Most people in box stores like animals, but will sell dog collars one day and net guppies the next. Many would see this bad joke of an article as good training, if it weren't so boring to them to read any articles about fish.
 
GaryE said:
Even more interesting is whether the people in the store, even managing it, knew what they were selling. It's common in the business to refer to fish as units, and to look at unit sales. By calling those nasty fish 'algae eaters', they sell. They become "CAE units", and they move out well. For the companies running the stores, they are dirt cheap fish - much cheaper than fish that really eat algae are.
A classic is the Jack Dempsey, an interesting fish for an experienced keep with quite large tanks. They have enormous broods of babies, and that makes them very cheap indeed. In a lot of low quality stores, they turn over many units of JDs weekly, and so a fish that wrecks a beginner's tank and then dies is a staple, bread and butter fish in the trade. They possibly consider that more experienced, longer term customers won't remain their customers, so what their offerings do to the hobbyists doesn't matter. Once you've learned not to kill your fish, you don't need fish and equipment often anyway.
Some chains have done detailed market research on which 'units' sell best when placed beside which other 'units', and they have the sales down to a science. They also study which dry goods sell where, etc. No difference is made. They sometimes hire knowledgeable students or young aquarists. I was in a local box store and the woman there saw I knew what I was doing, and asked me a few questions. She then quietly, almost whispering, told me where the independent stores were, and suggested I shop there instead. She said "You're new in town. You aren't stuck with these stores. You have better options for fish and plants nearby."
Most people in box stores like animals, but will sell dog collars one day and net guppies the next. Many would see this bad joke of an article as good training, if it weren't so boring to them to read any articles about fish.
Click to expand...
By rights, very few stores should sell a common pleco. Very few people (even among experienced fish keepers) can house a fully grown one. And yet they are ubiquitous in fish stores, especially the big box stores. They probably sell them to people who complain about algae in their tanks because they don't make any money by telling people to cut their lighting an hour.
 
All we can do is learn for ourselves. I hope no one took the brutal article as the truth, but people who would read only one article and think they knew are victims waiting for predators anyway.

I've wriiten and sold hundreds of articles and thousands of books about fishkeeping, and I've given my opinions on responsible fishkeeping a pretty good airing over the years. It's a bit like peeing in the ocean, as far as effect goes! I'll fight my corner, and the kids will go home with common plecos that they'll have to give up in a few years, if the fish even live that long.
 
I did not read the article linked in this thread.

Here is why I know what little I do. This is my bookmarks menu. Folders contain from 5 to about 25-30 links to research papers.

Bookmarklist.jpg


Here is my fish folder on my Bookmarks bar. The drop down folders contain just a few to as many as 20 links.
Fish Info.jpg


I have come not to trust almost anything I read on many aquarium sites. I like Planetcatfish so much because of all the Ph.D.s there and the fact they have a scientific sections where papers and even graduate thesis material gets linked.

I fond other sites because of how I type a search into the search box. For example, I get species info by searching for the "Fish name seriously" (name of fish followed by the word seriously gets me to the species info on seriouslyfish.com).
 
Planet catfish and seriouslyfish are my go-tos as well. Loaches online is pretty good, too, though not always as in-depth as the others.
 
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