Certainly worth a try asking your local MA! I don't know wales so dont know whereabouts you are LOL but our Swansea and Cardiff branches are meant to be amongst the best. Its all about who you know, take your time looking about and get chatting, find out who orders the fish and be very nice
works for me. Any customer who is nice to me will find im a sucker LOL. A nice customer is such a rarity! Let alone one who is actually interested in the hobby
I know how devastating it is to lose fish like that though
I lost 11 adult discus and 5 medium sized discus (including two adult Penang Erruptions, two adult Red Melons, two adult blue turqs, an adult red turq, two adult pigeon bloods, a white butterfly and a blue cobalt). Over three different tanks, all housed with other species like clown loach, sting rays, angelfish and my sorubim. Its obviously my fault it somehow spread from tank to tank (i was so careful, never worked out what happened... quite likely my ex used the wrong nets tbh) and it never effected any species other than discus.
Was a bizarre internal infection, possibly fungal i think we worked out, either way.. you could watch the disease progress... it killed within 12 hours... first a small white thumbprint sized grey patch on either side of them just behind and below their pectoral fins, then within 2-4 hours that grey patch went to white and then started becoming a sunken dip in their body. Within 4-6 hours it was an obvious wound. Within 6-8 hours it looked like a hole shot through them and by this point, most discus died or i had to euthanise them.
Was awful, in the time it took me to see the problem (typically it started in the evening about 9pm!) and i treated right away with a JBL treatment (forget the name of it but its not on te shelves any more). By morning i'd lost half my discus and i took day off work and called round vets and tried 90% water changes and dosing with pimafix but by the end of that day all my discus were dead and my other fish were all thoroughly hacked off! Took ages to settle down the stressed fish afterwards.
EDIT: it wasn't so much the financial aspect or the loss of time and effort... (just thought i'd clarify!) but more... each fish had its own name and personality and story of how i came to own them. They had all bonded in funny pairs and groups and all had learnt to hand feed... i adored these fish, especially 'little melly' my Red Melon whom i had from a tiny scrap and would come sit in my hand if i cupped my hand in the tank!
Its gutting... I adore discus... but I honestly dont know if i could ever face keeping them again after that devastation. One discus belonged to my ex and had done for 6 years or so and others were ones id saved up for or were christmas and birthday presents. One pair we drove 300 miles to get
Never did find out what it was! I think I may have posted about it at the time but god... i very nearly quit my job working with fish and never kept them again! It was devastating to lose my stingrays and arrowanas later on (long story... makes me mad) and then after buying two more stingrays... to lose them before even getting them home. I dont have much luck! People joke about me being a fish murderer
Anyhoo... that was a random story... it just put me in mind of it, thinking about how you lost your limia. I lost my limia in the stress after such a big waterchange and panic trying to get all the discus the heck out of that tank (also had my stingrays in there!). Mental note, Sorubims do NOT react well to stressful situations!
I might possibly have been a sorrubim limia in my past life!
