LFS Poly practices

[benzjamin13]

I believe that besides the minimal feeding, the tanks are overcrowded. Filtration also plays a role. While we over filter, they usually have just a few large filters for many tanks. Is this enough for all those tanks? Probably just enough. Some store do a lot of water changes to keep up with the overcrowding, but there are others that don't do that many water changes either. I read an article in TFH awhile back where they explain the "Fish Will Only Grow To The Size Of Their Tank" myth. Fish release hormones that resticts their growth rate to conserve space and energy. This doesn't necessarily stunts the fish, but the hormones that they release into the water will slow their growth rate down if there is enough of it. There are a lot of factors that is involved.

I bought a Catfish from a lfs. While mine grew at a fast pace, the ones at the lfs remained basically the same size.

I bought an Albino Senegal from another lfs which kept their Sens in there feeder tank. With all the live feeders around, their Sens grew a lot faster than the ones I took home.

So it all boils down to these factors: Feeding, Filtration, Water Changes, and Space.

 

[uting]

Fish growth is generally modelled using the Von Bertalanffy growth curve (http://homepage.mac.com/mollet/VBGF/VBGF.html), where fish grow fast during their initial years, before plateauing and growing minimally during their adult lives. With this in mind, it's quite intuitive that proper feeding and care during the initial years of an animal's life are essential for it to reach its growth potential.

I truly doubt that you could easily distinguish between stunting and genetic size limitation at home. To empirically test this theory, you would need a large number of small bichirs that you could then randomly segregate into four treatments (poor diet; poor water quality; good diet; good water quality) and a control group kept in average conditions during this whole time. You could then measure the bichirs from each group every week or so and run statistical tests to make sure that any size differences were not simply due to chance.

Of course, if your bichir is four times the size of the ones from the same batch that you see in the store after a period of time, it is reasonable to assume that your care (or the store's lack of care) is affecting its growth.

Lastly, as a matter of defending LFS a little - they're not devious, snivelling creatures bent on making life worse for fish or their keepers. Fact of the matter is, when you have tens of thousands of animals to care for and hundreds of tanks, you cannot afford to feed quality food to all of them all of the time. That, and while recreational fish keepers are allowed to spend as much time as they like on maintenance while sparing no expense, employees in fish stores have to serve customers to the best of their ability before they can focus on the maintenance of water quality etc. Above all else, fish stores are businesses. They have to turn a profit in order to exist, they're not just 'hobby aquaria'.

Like an earlier poster put it: LFS just hold onto and maintain fish until they can be sold. They're not there to grow them out to impressive sizes for the pleasure of doing so - although many of the staff do at home.

I don't need to say anything

 

[Cohazard]

Piscineidiot, that was a great post, and I was thinking the same thing.

fwiw, I don't think any one was putting down LFS practices, rather, just understanding them better, and we can't put them all on the same field as was establsihed already, since we know their practices will be as varied as those of the hobbyists.


I agree with you too Ben.

 

[CTU2fan]

Something else that I've noticed, not sure if this is done everywhere though...low temps. My regular LFS has always had the temps between 72-74, and the nearest chain store does the same. Makes sense, lower temps > less eating > less pooping > cleaner water, but it also means less growth.