My LFS Not Sure About

Hi,
My son's tank has cycled and mine is nearly there We visited our LFS, a well known large chain dealing in just aquatics including ponds etc.

They have around 400 odd tanks..we have been there before and have always been reasonably impressed but yesterday was a bit shocked.

A couple of tanks did not seem too clean and we put that down to being busy/understaffed etc. But further down and near the info/help desk in the fish room we noticed one tank, with a large amount of detritus etc stuck to the glass and in the tank there was clearly a dead fish and a little further down another tank with a dead freshwater crab!!

We did not inform them as they were serving and we did not want to cause a fuss...but now I do not know whether to trust the shop when we are ready to stock. I must say that in 6 or so visits this is the first time we have noticed anything.

What say you? Should I purchase from there or give it a wide berth?

Thanks for your advice Brecon. Think I will give them a miss!!

I have read a number of things by people who work in fish shops.

When fish arrive in a shop, they are very stressed and the death toll can be quite high. Shops expect to lose a fair number of newly arrived fish. The good shops have someone go round the tanks every morning before opening to remove the dead fish, and again during the day as the number of customers permits. The odd newly-dead fish is common. What you should not see is decomposing fish that have obviously been there for days - it shows the shop does not examine the tanks.
The same applies to sick fish. You should not see tanks with whitespot, for example. These fish should be undergoing treatment. You do see tanks with labels on them saying the fish are being treated, but I've never been able to work out how that works in shops where the filtration system runs a whole rank of tanks 

Quarantine - it seems that the current economic situation is affecting things there. Many shops can no longer afford to have tanks set aside to quarantine newly arrived fish for a week. The current practice seems to be to label a tank as 'fish not for sale - acclimating' for just 24 hours. This is one reason I usually quarantine all my new fish for 2 weeks before putting them in my proper tanks, though even this may not be long enough. I have to confess that the fish I got yesterday went straight in the tank mainly because I've never had a problem with fish from that shop, and the chap who served me said they'd been in for a while.



Brecon's suggestion about asking questions is a good one. Make sure you know the answer first  . If they say you can keep a common plec in a 100 litre tank, for example, you'll know they are talking rubbish. Or find a predatory fish and ask if you can keep it with neons. An example of a good shop is a woman I overheard in conversation with a customer. No sir, you can't have those fish as you already have xxxx. No sir you can't have those either. Since you have xxxx already why don't you look at this fish or that fish instead, they'll go with what you already have. And the woman was making very sensible suggestions.