# Wild caught only fish



## LVKSPlantlady (Oct 4, 2009)

Can anyone give me a list of fish that are not breed AT ALL in captivity? Or lead me to good sites on that subject?


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## TAB (Feb 7, 2009)

Off the top of my head.

Octos
kuhlii loachs
fresh water eels
elephant noses
tons of NW cichlids


There are a litterly tons that are very common to the hobby that are only WC.


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## niko (Jan 28, 2004)

If you are asking that question with the intent to breed and sell the fish please make sure you know which fish will sell well. Just being rare does not make them desireable.

I imported rare fish in the last 2 years. What I saw myself about fish that are not bred in aquariums is that they are seasonal. Generally when they are in season they are very cheap from the exporters and when they are not in season they are not available at all of course.

Asian exporters have tons of fish but pack pretty bad. They prefer to tell you that their fish are tank bread and healthy and ship well and so on. Not all of them are and you need to know which ones are not tank bred if you care about that. South American exporters have less varieties but pack much better. Survival rate on the S. American shipments is much, much higher despite the fact that their fish are wildcaught.

Quite a few of the rare fish I imported actually laid eggs. From what I saw though it looks like the longer the wild fish are kept in an aquarium the more they lose the desire to lay eggs. Some of the gobbies I had laid eggs about every week. After about 6 months they stopped or the egg nests where much smaller. So whatever fish you get get them to breed as soon as you can.

Also, you probably know - virtually every importer does not quarantine. It would be best if you find a person that actually imports the fish and quarantines them for at least 2 weeks. Don't buy the fish hot off the plane. For Asian exporters the mortality is at least 30% and often up to 50% in the next few weeks. 

Aslo don not "special order" from some LFS. All they do is sell you overpriced fish hot off the plane. Best person to ask for rare fish is Lotsoffish that lives in the Aquabid ghetto design and management web auction site. Contact him directly. Not the most reliable person on Earth, packaging is bad, but that's your best shot. Guy brings a lot of rare fish constantly. Don't ask him if he quarantines - you will be assured he does, of course. But once again that is your best shot.

--Nikolay


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## LVKSPlantlady (Oct 4, 2009)

The reason I ask is not to try and breed them myself, at least not yet, I ask to encorage people to NOT buy these fish because of habitat destruction and over fishing...

But i have heard of kuhili's breeding in captivity...


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## Franco (Jun 25, 2010)

Elephantnose fish and baby whales are incapable of breeding in captivity because their electrical signals which they use to find mates get reversed in captivity. A lot of the rarer and pricier plecos will breed in captivity infrequently but because they are being harvested from more and more remote regions of the amazon, preventing their demise in nature might be of interest to you. Heck, even zebra plecos are nearly extinct in the wild now but they are the easiest plecos I've ever bred.


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## Noto (Oct 26, 2009)

Wild collection is not always bad. The classic case is the cardinal tetra, which is harvested from the Rio *****. The fishery is sustainable and encourages local people and governments to protect the waters that their valuable export comes from; if the wild-caught fish were supplanted by captive-bred ones, the impetus to protect the waterways would be much less, and the wild populations of the cardinal tetra (and numerous other fish species) might suffer.

Also, captive breeding is not always good. Fish farms are often ecological catastrophes, for a whole variety of reasons ranging from land use changes and hydrological disturbance to introductions of fish or pathogens to the local ecosystem. These problems are much bigger with the food aquaculture industry, simply because it's operated on a larger scale, but also apply to the ornamental fish industry.

I applaud your intentions, but I'm just pointing out that blanket generalizations like, "Buy captive-bred fish, not wild-caught fish" don't take all the conditions into account. Judgments must be made on a case-by-case basis. It would be nice if some organization provided sustainability info for the various ornamental fish species the way Monterey Ba Aquarium and others do for seafood species.


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## Gordon C. Snelling (Jun 20, 2007)

My personal preference is wild over domestic fish. They tend to have better color and more interesting behavior than domestic material. They can however also be more difficult to breed. I agree that the collection of wild fish is far from a bad thing these days as a good bit of it is done in as sustainable a way as possible. I do however have to agree that habitat destruction is a very real problem when it comes to the habitat these fish come from and sadly all to soon a great many of our favorite species will only be available as domestically produced specimens. 
I had not heard of the electrical field problems with some of the electric fishes but suspect it is less a field reversal than just interference caused by lights heaters and all the other electrical appliance that make our lives so easy.


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