Online Fish Ordering In/To Canada????
- Thread starter Zum14
- Start date
below water is from canada I believe- I get their stock list from time to time and its from canada-
I've ordered from Spencer Jack, (cichlaholics/Afishonado) and based on that one experience I would advise you not to order from him. He IS great about replying quickly to e-mails but that's about all he's great at. I should have had some red flags go up when the blue tetras I wanted to order off his list were eaten when one of his workers put incompatible fish in their tank but I really wanted some of the fish he had to offer so I went ahead.
Basically we did a group order to Toronto. There were 12 or so folks who ordered. The fish arrived on the expected date and myself and another orderer went to pearson to pick them up. We had ordered just over 100 cardinal tetras split 10 ways and within a week I had the only two that were still alive (they're still alive today thankfully). I personally got some xystichromis sp kyoga flameback from him and within a few days 4 of the 8 I ordered had died in a tank that had housed 6 p. polleni and 5 c. moorii just fine only days prior to receiving the fish.
I received 4 p. bleekeri from him of which two had deformities which in my tanks would have called for culling long before they reached the size I received them at. Added to that two of the fish were in awful shape when I got them with the other two only being slightly better.
I got a snowwhite socolofi from him for a customer ( I run a maintenance service) who had been bugging me for a pure white fish for a long time. Boy was she excited to see it. Her excitement though, could not have topped my embarassment when I had to come back to her place a few days later and explain that I was going to be putting a concotion of medicines into her tank (gratis of course) because most of the fish I'd received in the order were diseased. Not only did it cost me money but it looked bad when I'm supposed to be the expert keeping the tank in perfect shape.
I ended up spending over $50 on medication to try and clear up the problems with his fish. I'd never had to use any medications prior to this (mostly because I always hand picked my fish and had never ordered online before)
Other folks had it even worse than I did with more expensive fish dying on them or being in really poor shape and needing revival. After the order coordinator exchanged e-mails with spencer his basic response was to say, "screw you guys, you must be awful fish keepers." Of course, no amateur fish keepers order fish online, they just go to the pet shop which he should have known and on top of that there were folks like myself with thousands of gallons worth of tanks and hundreds of healthy thriving fish or the poor fellow who'd been keeping fish for 25 years and felt so slighted by the insult that he wrote a personal note to the guy to express his dismay at the response.
Anyways, just thought I would warn you before you make the mistake we did. Oliver Lucanus (who has a fish photography effect named after him incidentally) is out of montreal and apparently ships really good quality fish and has some pretty rare stuff as well though I cannot speak from personal experience only word of mouth. belowwater.com is his website and you can get on his mailing list for his stock list.
Best of luck.
P.S. what fish are you looking for specifically?
Basically we did a group order to Toronto. There were 12 or so folks who ordered. The fish arrived on the expected date and myself and another orderer went to pearson to pick them up. We had ordered just over 100 cardinal tetras split 10 ways and within a week I had the only two that were still alive (they're still alive today thankfully). I personally got some xystichromis sp kyoga flameback from him and within a few days 4 of the 8 I ordered had died in a tank that had housed 6 p. polleni and 5 c. moorii just fine only days prior to receiving the fish.
I received 4 p. bleekeri from him of which two had deformities which in my tanks would have called for culling long before they reached the size I received them at. Added to that two of the fish were in awful shape when I got them with the other two only being slightly better.
I got a snowwhite socolofi from him for a customer ( I run a maintenance service) who had been bugging me for a pure white fish for a long time. Boy was she excited to see it. Her excitement though, could not have topped my embarassment when I had to come back to her place a few days later and explain that I was going to be putting a concotion of medicines into her tank (gratis of course) because most of the fish I'd received in the order were diseased. Not only did it cost me money but it looked bad when I'm supposed to be the expert keeping the tank in perfect shape.
I ended up spending over $50 on medication to try and clear up the problems with his fish. I'd never had to use any medications prior to this (mostly because I always hand picked my fish and had never ordered online before)
Other folks had it even worse than I did with more expensive fish dying on them or being in really poor shape and needing revival. After the order coordinator exchanged e-mails with spencer his basic response was to say, "screw you guys, you must be awful fish keepers." Of course, no amateur fish keepers order fish online, they just go to the pet shop which he should have known and on top of that there were folks like myself with thousands of gallons worth of tanks and hundreds of healthy thriving fish or the poor fellow who'd been keeping fish for 25 years and felt so slighted by the insult that he wrote a personal note to the guy to express his dismay at the response.
Anyways, just thought I would warn you before you make the mistake we did. Oliver Lucanus (who has a fish photography effect named after him incidentally) is out of montreal and apparently ships really good quality fish and has some pretty rare stuff as well though I cannot speak from personal experience only word of mouth. belowwater.com is his website and you can get on his mailing list for his stock list.
Best of luck.
P.S. what fish are you looking for specifically?
wow, thanks for the reply, i really like to hear bad stuff as funny as it sounds because if you hear all good things just dont add up you know? ive looked at the below water, but he told me he doesnt send his stock list out too often and doesnt ship much as hes mostly shipping to asia right now. Basically i have a large list of possibilities, im building a 750Gal and thinking of actually doing 2 now but the list is:
a couple royal plecos (quantity depending on price)
tiger shovelnose
Black ghost knife
royal clown knife
mabye a florida or spotted gar.
school of silver dollars (quantity depending on price)
possibly some more different plecos, king tiger and such if the price is good.
also i have that 46gal and im looking for some red zebra cichlids (females)
and a couple of groups of (1m 3f) of 2 other species of cichlids that might pair up good, my wife loves the yellow labs and i was thinking mabye a blue variety as well.
im kinda thinking of mabye joining the cichla owners too..... who knows.
a couple royal plecos (quantity depending on price)
tiger shovelnose
Black ghost knife
royal clown knife
mabye a florida or spotted gar.
school of silver dollars (quantity depending on price)
possibly some more different plecos, king tiger and such if the price is good.
also i have that 46gal and im looking for some red zebra cichlids (females)
and a couple of groups of (1m 3f) of 2 other species of cichlids that might pair up good, my wife loves the yellow labs and i was thinking mabye a blue variety as well.
im kinda thinking of mabye joining the cichla owners too..... who knows.
I dont know about BC (I think that's where you're from right?) but here in Ontario those are all common enough. The cichlids can be purchased inexpensively from local breeders and you often get really high quality fish and the knives, gars etc. are usually for sale in a variety of stores. Id check with bcaquaria for some local breeders of some of it. If you haven't purchased from one before I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Not to mention, you'll be supporting local people. As for the other fish, if you're near vancouver I believe there are a lot of Asian-owned shops there that would definitely have what you're looking for. I find the Asian stores tend to stock more of that stuff than does Big Al's or the independents.
ya. i have been scouring the bcaquaria forum. awsome!. i need to try one i think, i wouldnt mind getting some from ontario but havent found much online. Im apparantly still getting a part time job at a pet store to help them out but the problem is even with the discount its still over 10$ for one silver dollar nickel size! i dunno seems a bit much..... or not??
Knowing what you are looking for, I think your best bet is to tell Canadian Aquatics what you are looking for and see how much of it they can get in for you. Then wait until they have alot of them in and have them shipped all at once. I know that they have some nice Royals right now. 
I hope you took his post with a grain of salt!Alistriwen;3192690; said:
Maybe you do have bad fish keeping practices!! As per quote one of your previous posts...(Couple of questions. Been having a lot of problems with fish death and disease all of a sudden, but I suppose it's to be expected eventually when you have 20 tanks.
Most recently I came across two new problems. I have a pretty much fully grown guppy born and raised here that for the last 2 days has been bloated and has a white poo coming out of him that wont come off. Im pretty sure this is some kind of parasite so we've held off on feeding and are going to purchase some antiparasite food tomorrow. The fish was moved to a quarantine tank and we're wondering if we should be worried about the other fish in the tank and if anything else should be done?
Also, another fish we raised here came down with what Im fairly sure was dropsy. His scales were flared out, his belly was distended abnormally and his eyes seemed to pop out a bit. We didn't want to risk an outbreak so we put him in a sealed container in the freezer and let him pass. I was wondering three things. One is whether I should be worried about the other fish in that tank? We did a large water change once the fish was removed and have always done at least 25% per week anyways. Should we put any sort of medication in? I am also wondering if we did the right thing by euthanizing the fish? Lastly, is freezing fish a good way of euthanizing? My roomie insisted it was and I was too aggravated with the situation to argue.
Any thoughts would be appreciated! )
LMAO...I have order 3 times from Spencer Jack and never lost a fish.They all came in excellent health. I am glad your not my fish maintenance service!!
