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Re: Aphyosemion arnoldi
Tom Grady wrote:
>
> Knowing Gary is probably sitting in a jail in Quebec City right now
> <chuckles>, I thought I'd kinda help move along the arnoldi discussion for
> him until he returns to the real world <uhm Sorry Gary - couldn't resist
> the chance - Folks - Gary is at the protests for the Hemispheric Free Trade
> meeting.>
>
> Anyway - I was among those who Gary passed arnoldi on to. Species
> Maintenance Committee - so yes the AKA was semi-aware and we were hoping to
> pass along enough to Fred for N&SRC, but unfortunately, the imports were
> incredibly hard to work with.
Hello,
I woke up this morning feeling like I had velvet, but after all the tear
gas in Quebec, there ain't no ectoparasites on this lad anymore. And I
was in the peaceful march...
To arnoldi. I did try to get it into the AKA, as Tom said. The problem
is the following - if an importer brings a fish like this in, costs are
high. There's the practice of "crapping out" wild fish, by not feeding
them for a week or so prior to transport to avoid fouling of the heavily
populated bags. This is if the fish are even fed after capture. The
exporters do it to all fish, and it works for characins, cichlids, etc.
For killies, with their metabolisms when young (they ship sexed out
juveniles - the arnoldi were at most 2.5 cm) it's a killer. The
emaciated fish have to be coaxed back to life, and mortality rates are
high.
With mortality comes markup - shipping from Africa costs a lot, and
killies don't always start out cheap. Once the importer puts a
reasonable markup on a high cost fish, it is expensive. Because they
come so ragged, he also has to keep them til they can be shipped out
safely.
The importer doesn't want to sell pairs, because he isn't sold pairs. He
wants to sell fish, in quantities worth shipping. But clubs don't want
to take a chance on an entire box of one species at $7-10 US per fish.
It's a catch 22. An importer doesn't want to sell two or three pairs, as
taking them to the airport, air freight etc is too much trouble for the
return. I know this importer, but I can't be a middleman as I'm in
Canada, and can't mail US AKAers fish. Frustrating, eh?
The importer brings in killies, but they become too expensive to sell.
So he takes a beating on them, and on and on and on.
The number of species on import lists is astonishing. We don't get wild
fish because we aren't a viable market.
-Gary
PS - the last shipment came in as 50% Batanga lebretonis gobies. So
that's what arnoldi lives with. Or rather, that's what likes arnoldi as
much as we do, for different reasons...
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