Captive bred fish: Please Respond

[Delphinus]

Personality, hmmm.

My two A. ocellaris are captive-bred. One is about 4, 5 years old and the other about 2. They are a mated pair. I never really felt that they lacked personality, until I put a ritteri into their tank. They now never leave their anemone home. So to be fair, they might still have personality but I never see them except when they dart out to catch a piece of food. The rest of the time, they are just having sex and breeding like rabbits. Yeah, it's cool, but it's not interesting to look at (there is nothing to look at. They literally are completely buried in the anemone, you can't see them at all. The anemone's interesting to look at, but the fish aren't because they're invisible. Is this making any sense? I dunno..)

My yellow tang, OTOH, which of course is wild-caught, has more than enough personality for my liking. That is, if "personality," is of course defined as "the urge to eat and eat and eat and eat eat eat. I must eat! Did I mention I must eat? DON'T FEED THAT CORAL, FEED ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!" You get the idea. It gets a little tiresome sometimes actually, that I can never feed any corals in that tank because the tang, or the shrimp, steal anything and everything. Ok, to be fair, the fish isn't as bad as the shrimp, which can be loathesome little theives sometimes. (They don't even eat the stuff they steal. It's enough satisfaction to them, just to ensure that nothing else in the tank can eat. "Oh shoot, that open brain is about to swallow a teeney tiny morsel. I MUST DO EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO PREVENT THIS." Stupid shrimp. Personality or no, leave my corals alone! Ok, I take that back. They're pretty to look at, they breed and provide a planktonic food source, but man, are they ever annoying little theives some days...)

Doug: I've heard conflicting rumours about C-Quest too. The thing that has me convinced, is this. There used to be a website for them, www.c-quest.com I think. That site no longer exists, but the domain was taken over by some other company. To me, that cinches it. It means they are either gone for good, or the rebuilding process has set them back so far that it wasn't ecomonically feasible to continue to pay to advertise their existence in the meantime, which is an unusual tactic for a business (it basically means they're out of business). Who knows, maybe there are other factors involved too. I thought the guy who was running it was doing so as a hobby business so-to-speak, after he had retired from his "real" vocation. Perhaps it was too much work, and he decided simply to enjoy his retirement without worrying trying to keep a barely-viable business afloat.

Starting to see some comments that to me, give credibility to my idea of artificially inflating the cost of wild-caught. If wild-caught costs $10 each, and captive bred costs $20, of course, people will gravitate towards the wild-caught. If, however, the cost of wild-caught was made to be, say $30, suddenly that $20 doesn't look so bad anymore. I think there are valid cases where wild-caught should be an option, for example, a breeder who needs genetic diversity, or perhaps a specialized hobbyist or something like that, but in those cases those people are probably willing to pay a tiny little bit extra anyways. For the mass-consumption market, captive-bred should be more than adequate. I think, anyways...

[ 21 June 2002, 09:25: Message edited by: delphinus ]