PlanetCatfish.com

Sinatra wrote:G'day

I found a website that advertises here, the Zebs are listed at US$80 each.

http://www.riverwonders.com/catalog/c7_p1.html

Is this website for real? Do they still have stock?

Thanks Sinatra

I've heard a lot of good things about these people, but I'm a little annoyed by their blatant false advertising. They may have HAD hundreds of Zebra Plecos, but they don't anymore. That hasn't stopped them from keeping my money for the last 6 weeks. They HAVE been responsive to all of my emails, but keep promising "hopefully next week we will have them." OK, fine, but then update your website. Saying you have hundreds of them when you don't is not cool.

Mike_Noren wrote:I'm guessing (note: guessing) that the presently sold zebras are all captive bred. It's not a terribly difficult fish to breed, after all, and the profit margin is great.

AFAIK, most zebras are wild caught. If they were farmed then we shouldn't see such price fluctuations. While they are reasonably easy to bred and it's worht the effort, they aren't commercially farmed on a large scale becuase they are not prolific. Say 25 zebras MAX. per spawn and a long time to reach saleable size/ To breed these things in captivity would take a lot of time and investment (in a previous post I compared it to setting up a vineyard / wine production).

There are so many more fish out there you can make a quicker buck with. Mind you, as the marine hobby has shown, there's ,money to be made if you can bear the initial investment.

Jools

Mike_Noren wrote:However, the Brazilian authorities have banned collection of zebra plecs, due to the fact that a large part or all of the habitat in which the zebra plecs live, is going to be destroyed by the building of a hydroelectric dam (and hence the species probably wiped out).

There must be some great sinister minds at work here. First they stop the collection of the species, then they proceed to exterminate them.

Not sure the minds are neither great nor sinister... When dams are built in the tropics, things go extinct, and the choice between a few commercially unimportant fishes, frogs, etc and a large dam generating millions of dollars in revenue and providing energy to the community is an easy one for most politicians. The dam in the yellow river, for example, is suspected to have extinguished 17 species of vertebrates.

It just so happens that in this particular case one of the (possible) casualties is a species we know.

Fishing them are forbiden for IBAMA. You will find more information in this post:

http://www.forum.planetcatfish.com/view ... c&start=30