Farm Bred Clowns in FL

[andyroo]

Captive breeding is a bit of a double-edged sword.
Nice to take the pressure off wild stocks, too bad about the little local catcher's lost income. Mercenary middle-men i'm not interested in supporting.
All a question of a) sustainability/monitoring of wild stocks and harvest, which we can be pretty sure is barely happening if at all and b) making sure the little catcher-man is getting a share. "Sell the sizzle" of a (wild) supplier and 1st world shop partnering in a marketed brand of size, quality and/or "feel good" factor.

I'm all for pet-capture tourism. Great way to take a $10 loach and charge you/the enthusiast (via guides, accommodation, food, taxis/transport etc...) $3500 for it.

Anyone interested in Cambodia i know a little man....
And there's Nonn in Thailand.
Then we ask you to post the trip photos :)
A

[RD.]

Old thread, just thought I would bump it up and see if anyone is still seeing farm raised clown loaches in their area? These were the first and last that I saw in Canada, but I did hear of a possible supplier shipping some to a vendor in Winnipeg recently.

[mikev]

They are regularly offered online and often on Aquabid by Bioaquatics:

http://www.bioaquatix.com/fish.py#FIN_0200

(I do not have their clowns -- but I do have their TR Garras and they are fine)

[RD.]

Thanks, I know of Bioaquatix, but they are really small time breeders that for the most part can only stock hobbyists. Right now, their entire stock for CL's is less than 200 pieces. That, and their prices pretty much remove them from supplying the vast majority of retail outlets that can purchase same size CL's for less than half the price. But still, a worthy cause & awesome to see someone breeding them at any kind of level.

[mikev]

their entire stock for CL's is less than 200 pieces.

I think this is just how their web interface reports it.

As for prices: they regularly sell on AB at lower price than the web site, so I'd guess they sell to distributors as well at a lower price.
(Of course I do not know the details of their business, but raising 200 only does not make enough financial sense and they would have been out of business long ago.)

[RD.]

I kinda doubt it, Mike. If you look at their various pics on their website, and videos posted on youtube, they are a very small outfit, a mere puddle in a large ocean of commercial farms in S. Florida. They don\t even have a Min Order Amount, which is pretty much unheard of in the wholesale fish biz, at least with the larger suppliers. I worked in the wholesale side of the business for close to a decade, these guys are small producers, and the work involved to produce even small amounts of CL's in captivity is extremely labour intensive, and time = $$. Does it make financial sense to them, I guess so, or they wouldn't still be doing it. As smaller producers with low overhead they can probably afford to spend the time doing it, and it obviously makes a name for them, as none of the larger farms are breeding CL's on a commercial basis. And of course, this is only one of numerous species that they are breeding at their facility. They could drop their efforts with breeding CL's and remain in business for another 20 yrs.

They also mentioned last year in their "news" link; "Lately, more effort has been invested into our tank raised Clown Loaches and Cardinal Tetras; the main goal is to provide more regular spawning. " That was posted just 11 months ago, so obviously they are wanting to increase production beyond what they were/are producing. http://bioaquatix.com/news.py

Either way, no biggie, they are indeed doing something that for now no one else has bragging rights to. I salute their efforts.

[mikev]

No way to know how they operate but unless they do some volume I just do not see how they can be doing this for a few years.

[RD.]

I'm sure that they do some volume, just not with CL's. A commercial farm like that does not base all of their livelihood on a single species of fish. Think about it. You also have to remember that not everyone seeks the life of a millionaire, for some folks just livin' the dream is good enough.

The bottom line is this, if anyone in North America was producing CL's in large quantities for the wholesale market, myself and a whole lot of other people would know about it. This would be a very BIG thing in the aquatic world, and this would have been posted all over the WWW a long time ago, with photos and vids to back it up. The reality is that to breed CL's in captivity requires hormones, some special handling of each individual fish, including both the males and females, and some specially fine tuned parameters for the survival of the eggs, larvae, and fry. https://www.was.org/documents/MeetingPr ... 2_0621.pdf

If it was easy, and cost effective, all the large farms such as Segrest would be doing it.