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Buying fish/coral online


Gil&Fin

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I prefer to buy fish and coral locally, but I have purchased from online retailers like LiveAquaria, BlueZoo, and Tidal Gardens on occassion.  I don't order enough to make a good judgment as to what retailers are worth looking at and what retailers I should avoid.  I'm interested in others' experiences.  For my part, I had a great shipment from LiveAquaria (Diver's Den) and would order from them again.  I had a not-so-good experience with Tidal Gardens (which is a bummer because I love Than's videos) and it is unlikely I would make an order from them again.  Anyone willing to share their thoughts?

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My go-to online coral place is now UniqueCorals.com. This is Scott Fellman's company (Scott spoke to our club in January.)

 

I've never gotten corals in as nice of shape as from there. Great color and polyp extension right out of the bag. Plus, their next day shipping is only $19.

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I've purchased corals from Golden Basket (mixed experiences, but all positive if I exclude zoas) and fish and inverts from Diver's Den (stellar experience in every way).

 

I plan to give Aqua SD a try soon. They post killer sales every weekend on the reef2reef forum, and I've just drooled so far, but I've heard only amazing things about them. I've been waiting till I have a nice little honey pot to go a bit crazy and make the shipping charge worth it.

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Golden  Basket is local (Tigard) and if you drop by his business he has an incredible amount of coral types for sale.  You can see them all first hand before buying and

he is a very helpful seller.  He showed me things I liked that I did not realize was there simply by describing what I was looking for.  I highly recommend a local person

stopping by his shop.  I will be back many times in the future.  He has very limited hours of operation so make sure you contact him first.

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I have gotten some of the nastiest pest imaginable from one of these places and they are not a sponsor nor unique corals, thank goodness I have a QT tank for fish and one for corals. I think  that some places get corals transshipped so frequently they are unable to monitor for things such as pests, parasites, and or algae, move it in move it out is their goal to maximize profits and minimize costs. It makes sense form many stand points but not mine. This makes people like Jeff at Cuttlefish and Corals and Scott at Unique Corals some of the preferred places to grab things from as they are mainly sustainable aquacultured or maricultured specimens or at the very least they have been in a system long enough to determine whether they are healthy stock or not.

 

This is just my opinion and can be taken for whatever it may be worth, regardless of where you go do some research into reviews and policies.

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Just my 2 cents, but I finally got the courage to order 3 fish online through Live Aquaria as they were having a sale this week on a couple fish I was interested. I ordered them and they showed up on my doorstep well packed exactly when they wear supposed to. I had my wife put the bags in the water to slowly acclimate (I was still at work) Honestly I expected the worst because let's face it, this hobby is bit expensive to gamble in especially when you are buying fish sight unseen. I slowly opened up the bags wondering what I'd find and to my delight, I saw three of the healthiest looking fish I've seen in a long time. The colors were vivid and they immediately started to eat. Moral of the story- I don't know, but I'm very happy with my first and only purchase from live aquaria.

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I ordered 3 fish from live aquaria, 1 being from diversden. The packaging from diversden is extremely well done. I think it was 15 bags for my sargassum trigger. Regular live aquaria was single or double...one of those, still pretty good. However, one of those fish arrived dead. Customer service is great as they credited me the fish right away. 

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