I’ve wrote about this before but here is a place that does not care about the fish but only how to make cash.
The Orchard Home & Garding in Celbridge are selling dyed fish as ‘Coloured Tetras’. The place is typical garden center that you can find many here in Ireland that has a small pet section.
I would recommend to avoid this place.

Here is a short video from the show for better quality watch it in HD:

As promised here are some photos from the show not the best quality but better than nothing. There should be even more photos and video coming later.

[nggallery id=1]

Just stumbled on a website with fancy name Aqua Art that offers Optiwhite aquariums in Ireland.
You can choose from different options they can make all tank of Optiwhite or they can make a tank that has only front Optiwhite glass.
For those of you who don’t know what Optiwhite is:
Optiwhite is special type of glass that does not have a green color tint.
So it is good that we have someone offering Optiwhite tanks but the problem I have is the price of the tanks and other goods on that website. It would be cheaper to buy a tank in UK and get it delivered to Ireland.
Also for TetraTec 1200 filter they are charging 230 Euro. When I bought mine 3 years ago I’ve paid 100 Euro and that was when nobody knew about recession.
For Eheim Classic 2260 they want 399 Euro. When on Zooplus you can get it for 259.95 Euro.
Oh well … looks like some companies have not noticed any recession.

Update: Aquarium Solution has explained that the fish were not ordered by them but instead was send by supplier which I was told happens quite often. Aquarium Solutions has removed all dyed fish from the shop.

I thought I will never see this in Ireland but unfortunately I was wrong. Today I was bypassing Ashbourne and decided to visit Aquarium Solutions pet shop. It’s a small shop located  in SuperValu shopping center. I’ve been there before and it used to be a pretty good shop but recently it started deteriorating.
I vas not expecting much today as most of the tanks were almost empty but one of the tanks had an unpleasant surprise for me. There we 2 painted fish in it. It looked to me that these were glass fish(Parambassis ranga)  The condition of both of them were terrible even non fish keeper could see that they were really sick and would not last long.
I though that the general view among fish keepers is that it is cruel to paint fish and that serious fish keepers would not import these fish, but obviously it is not the case for Aquarium Solutions.
I’m really sad that I had to see them in this country and I will be avoiding this shop in the future.

More about painted fish.

So here is the first post on this blog. I’ve spent all weekend in Zierfische & Aquarium Fair Duisburg 2010, Germany. This is the first international show that I’ve visited and I can tell you only one thing WOW!!! what a weekend. There were many different stands from companies and breeders from around the world. Loads of nice looking fish and also loads of fish tanks and equipment.
At the same time there were two competitions going on:
8th International Discus Championship which consisted of hundreds of nice looking discus
15th International EHBBC Showbetta Competition
Majority people that have visiting the show also went to Zoo Zajac pet shop(If it can be called pet shop) as it is just  a 5 minutes drive from the venue and I can say the shop is massive. The shop is even bigger than the venue where the show was hosted. I’ve spent couple hours in there just looking at the things. I wish we had something like that or even a quarter of the size in Ireland. You can get the almost everything in there.

Here are the links to photos and video:
Photos
Video