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Curious...Poll Question. How Many of Your Fish Die Within 6 Mos of Purchase?

Poll Results: How many of your fish die within 6 mos of purchase?

 
  • 8% (3)
    None
  • 37% (13)
    <10%
  • 8% (3)
    10-20%
  • 17% (6)
    21-30%
  • 8% (3)
    31-40%
  • 11% (4)
    41-50%
  • 0% (0)
    51-60%
  • 8% (3)
    >60%
35 Total Votes  
post #1 of 18
8/2/10 at 10:40am
Thread Starter 
How many of your fish die within 6 months of purchase? I'm just curious on this...feel free to elaborate if you'd like.

I've left the poll anonymous so no one sees who votes what. So, please be honest.
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post #2 of 18
8/2/10 at 11:53am


I lost 2 flame angels, the first died after one day..I hadn't quarantined any fish in those days. Then about 3 months later I purchased another from SWF.com... figured I had 15 days, it totally disappeared, I assume the CUC took care of the body....All the other fish were fine, I just couldn't keep a pigmy angel. Then one time not so long ago, I added a yellow wrasse...it looked around found a spot in the sand..Dug in and was never seen again.

Considering all the fish I have bought over the years, that really isn’t too bad. I purchased a Lemonpeel pigmy..LOL..I am a little gun shy with the flame angel. Folks have told me lemonpeels are the hardest to keep Not in my tank.
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post #3 of 18
8/2/10 at 1:04pm
I said none but I lost several hundred young Clownfish during an ammonia incident a couple of years ago. Since I raised these fish myself I didn't think they counted as "purchased".
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post #4 of 18
8/2/10 at 1:33pm
Less than 10% and it's usually within the first couple of weeks. Not all fish are healthy and some stuff is just simply out of our control on that. Buying from the wholesaler means I'm getting fish that just landed. Sometimes it takes awhile for them to show their true problems.

That's in recent years. It was greater then 10% when I first started over 10 years ago. Wild caught seahorses, at that time, were a biatch to get to live long term.
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post #5 of 18
8/2/10 at 2:14pm
I'm in the less than 10% category. I've actually only lost one fish in the past six months and that was due to a freak accident, nothing that the LFS did wrong. I also haven't purchased many fish in the last six months, but 9 months-a year ago, I bought a ton and the only thing I lost were three anthias, one of which had popeye when I bought him and I got him for free so it was a risk from the start.
I get almost all of my fish from a wholesaler as well, and quarantine everything, so even if there is an issue, it can usually be corrected.
IMO, if you're loosing more than 10%, it's time to change the place you're purchasing from or re-evaluate how you acclimate and quarantine your fish.
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post #6 of 18
8/2/10 at 6:01pm
I checked the 31%-40%. In the last few years, I've been trying several hard, to impossible to keep Butterflies and Angels, which has really upped my failure rate. But I sort of expect about in this loss range. I've learned some things and some tricks, and failure percentage seems to be dropping. I also am pretty strapped for LFS's here, so sometimes buying these harder to keep guys online, I am at the mercy of buying it sight unseen. But yea, their usually gone within 2 weeks, or they live over 6 months.
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post #7 of 18
8/2/10 at 6:11pm
i am in the 10% club.like these guys said some fish are doomed upon arrival .as long as you qt and really keep an eye on the tank water and fish you should be successful. my supplier has two morish idols 4-5 inch big.i saw them eating over the weekend.very tempting.
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post #8 of 18
8/6/10 at 1:32pm
i checked over 60%.... i dont know what it is sometimes but for the last year or so ive been losing fish after a few months..and i ve yet to find out why....once i had a really bad ich break out, that was explainable. But i had got a stellatus puffer and a small coral beauty at the same time, and about three weeks ago i had my coral beauty kick the bucket on me. I had him a little under 3months. My nitrate,nitrite and ammonia levels were 0. My salinity was about a 1.022. I do water changes with RO water every 2weeks. No fish were harassing it from what i could see. The same happened with a Naso Tang and of all things a juve snow flake eeel about 3 months ago. Now i was told that eels need a hight salinity, so maybe that was the cause but i dont know.
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post #9 of 18
8/6/10 at 2:25pm
I checked <10% but it should be 0%. I lost two this year only because the hawkfish was beating them up.
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post #10 of 18
8/6/10 at 4:57pm
Originally Posted by AquaKnight View Post
I checked the 31%-40%. In the last few years, I've been trying several hard, to impossible to keep Butterflies and Angels, which has really upped my failure rate. But I sort of expect about in this loss range. I've learned some things and some tricks, and failure percentage seems to be dropping. I also am pretty strapped for LFS's here, so sometimes buying these harder to keep guys online, I am at the mercy of buying it sight unseen. But yea, their usually gone within 2 weeks, or they live over 6 months.
What kinds of Butterflies/Angels? I want to do that eventually, so how's it working for you?
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post #11 of 18
8/6/10 at 4:59pm
Oh yeah, I check 41-50 percent, but as I've only had two fish ever, and one of them died, it's kind of a skewed sample.
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post #12 of 18
8/6/10 at 6:37pm
Originally Posted by gilbert View Post
What kinds of Butterflies/Angels? I want to do that eventually, so how's it working for you?
Rock Beauty Angel, Regal Angel, Blue Spotted Angel juvis x3, Multibarred Angel x2, Multicolor Angel x2, Potter's Angel x2, Tahitian Butterfly x2, Two Spot Coralfish x2, Three-Pendant Bannerfish, Horned Bannerfish, Caribbean Longnose Butterfly, Meyeri Butterfly, Blue-Striped Butterfly, and Rainfordi Butterfly.

Those are IMO, the are the tough ones. Of those, I'm about 65% success rate. Some like that Meyeri are gonna be a tough road to make a breakthrough on, if ever. I omitted some of the easier one, like my Blueface and Annularis, as those are more typical fish we know how to keep already.
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post #13 of 18
8/6/10 at 7:14pm
Don't they only eat live coral polyps? The Meyeri I mean. And I'm assuming that you have multiple tanks for all of these? Have you ever tried to breed any of them?

Hmmm... Kinda off topic... Sorry.
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post #14 of 18
8/6/10 at 7:36pm
Yep, 7 SW tanks running at the moment, but that list of fish is over a the last couple of years, I don't have many of those guys any more. The Meyeri is infact a true Corallivore (only eats coral polyps in the wild). The Orange Spotted Filefish is also a coralivore and they were once 'an impossible fish to keep,' but have been converted prepared foods, and even bred. Some success has stemmed from using fish roe with the filefish, so that what I tried (in addition to a barrage of other things including live coral), but he didn't make it.

I'm really not into breeding, that is quite the task, time I don't think I have. While dwarf angels do breed quite frequently, there is little development with breeding Large Angels and Butterflyfish, the two I'd be interested in. And at heart, I'm more of a 'responsible collection' guy, rather then a captive-bred.
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post #15 of 18
8/6/10 at 7:49pm
Oh. I was just thinking that if you could breed a large Angel or Butterflyfish, you could try to ween it onto prepared foods, and maybe they wouldn't be impossible to keep anymore. I know that ORA did that with the spotted mandarin, synchiropus picturatus, and I think it would be cool if we could do that with larger, and even harder-to-keep fish.
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post #16 of 18
8/7/10 at 7:59am
Recently its been bad. I lost two yellow tangs...one not sure what happened, was fine in QT and then died when put in the 55. Got another and an outbreak of Ich killed my Gramma and the Yellow tang. Had the Gramma for 6 months the yellow tangs were for 4 days and then the other for a week in a half.

Did the Green Chromis for cool schooling fish but like everyone else, they fought until one was left. So I have one left out of the 6 (started 3, then added 3 more so he could kill them off) in the 46 gallon.

And I cannot keep a psuedochromis alive at all, even with good water etc...The longest lasted 3 weeks while the first time I got one of these lasted 2 days.

The longest fish I have had is a Clownfish and a yellow tail (over 9 months I am guessing)
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post #17 of 18
8/13/10 at 12:31am
I checked the 31%-40%. In the last few years, I've been trying several hard, to impossible to keep Butterflies and Angels, which has really upped my failure rate. But I sort of expect about in this loss range. I've learned some things and some tricks, and failure percentage seems to be dropping. I also am pretty strapped for LFS's here, so sometimes buying these harder to keep guys online, I am at the mercy of buying it sight unseen. But yea, their usually gone within 2 weeks, or they live over 6 months.
First of all you have way to many angles no wonder your fish keep dieing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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post #18 of 18
8/21/10 at 7:41pm

i checked the 21-30 including my nems... i've had 6 fish and 3 nems. my fire fish jumped out of a two inch gap at the top of the aquarium and was on the floor for a day, and one of my RBTAs crawled into the rocks and hasn't been seen in a month. (technically though I didn't purchase that anemone, it cloned off of one I bought within six months.)

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