Fish Shipping Question

[majorhavok]

I guess if my fish keeping instincts are wrong on this one I'll be asking employees at the LFS not to bag my fish with any tank water anymore.

"No no no, you're doing it all wrong! Don't bag my fish in that established tank water that it's in, go to the back and get some tap water with water conditioner for my fish please. I have a long ride home."

I respect everyone's comments regarding this and think everyone that has taken the time to read the thread to this point would love to find out if one way might be better than the other. Time for a super easy experiment that may or may not provide interesting results.

Two 5 gallon buckets filled with the exact same amount of water with a 2.5" Comet in each one. One bucket has established tank water that the fish were living in and the other has fresh tap water. 2 ml of Prime water conditioner in each bucket. Fish had not eaten for 24 hours before they were put in their buckets and won't be fed while monitoring them. Planning on testing ammonia and nitrite levels daily along with monitoring overall appearance of the health of the fish. I'll keep you posted.

Here are the fish. Note the waste in the bucket with the fish on the right in the fresh tap water and lack of any waste in the other. I took this picture within a minute of getting the fish into their buckets. Could have been a fluke but reminds me of a popular saying, "I was so scared I pooped my pants".

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Unless you were studying which was the quicker way to make a comet poop, you have absolutely no data. And that's the problem with bad data, people draw conclusions from it which are usually wrong for the wrong reasons. And your sample size would have to be much larger to be meaningful in any case. What if the one in the tank water died after an hour? Would you conclude that then the tap water was the only acceptable method? Trust the people that do this for a living, they do what's best because of a lot of experience because it's their business.

 

[joe00]

Keeping/maintaining fish and aquariums is what I do for a living. That's why I was rather surprised to find out that a fish was shipped to me in fresh tap water with water conditioner instead of it's established tank water the fish had grown accustomed to and that was readily available. I've been in the hobby for a long time and had never heard of such a thing. I reached out on the forums here to see if this is more of a common practice than I had imagined. Obviously it is as more members besides this shipper do it.

Finding it hard to believe that shipping a fish like this has no ill effect regarding its well being or survival rate, I figured I would do a little non scientific experiment that probably did have plenty of room for error.

After less than two days the fish in the conditioned tap water is dead and the water is foul just like the fish I received DOA shipped this way. The fish in the established tank water is alive and well, never pooped, and reminds me of other shipped fish that arrive alive.

Could be a coincidence, but I've made up my mind.