International Members where do you shop?

Stuartmercer · Sep 21, 2021

Karen00 said:
I know this thread is a bit older but can you tell me your experience with Big Al's and their coral? I happened to be in the Toronto store getting some stuff for my freshwater fish so I decided to take a look at their reef livestock. Holy cow the coral frags were huge and cheap. They looked fairly healthy as well. I kept wondering what was wrong with them to be so big and cheap.

I've had good experience with their corals, although, I lack much experience with them. Otherwise, I've never had one die!

Karen00 · Sep 21, 2021

Stuartmercer said:
I've had good experience with their corals, although, I lack much experience with them. Otherwise, I've never had one die!

Nice! Not having them die is pretty important! Haha. One more question... Did they come with hitchhiker's or did you dip and/or quarantine first? The corals I saw looked really healthy but I wasn't sure how safe the tanks were. It looked like hitchhikers could be camping out in their tanks.

I just couldn't get over how big each one was.

Stuartmercer · Sep 21, 2021

Karen00 said:
Nice! Not having them die is pretty important! Haha. One more question... Did they come with hitchhiker's or did you dip and/or quarantine first? The corals I saw looked really healthy but I wasn't sure how safe the tanks were. It looked like hitchhikers could be camping out in their tanks. I just couldn't get over how big each one was.

As a safety measure you should always dip your corals, as I did. But no there was nothing but copepods from the corals I bought. Although each location is different, so some might be more pest -ridden than others. Always dip.

Karen00 · Sep 21, 2021

Stuartmercer said:
As a safety measure you should always dip your corals, as I did. But no there was nothing but copepods from the corals I bought. Although each location is different, so some might be more pest -ridden than others. Always dip.

Thanks so much! Yes, I plan to dip but wanted to be prepared in case anything scary jumped off the frags! Haha.

russmenard · Aug 11, 2022

I'm in Mozambique. I use a small and very limited (but with big spirit) LFS and the local tidepools.

LgTas · Aug 11, 2022

russmenard said:
I'm in Mozambique. I use a small and very limited (but with big spirit) LFS and the local tidepools.

Is that in Maputo? Such a beautiful country!

livinlifeinBKK · Aug 11, 2022

I'm in Bangkok. most of our marine shops are located at one major market that's sells everything and anything depending on what part you visit there are several saltwater shops a few of which are good...as for the others, you can get some decent livestock if you get to it before it's been there too long because I highly doubt they're well treated at some of the shops. All in all I like shopping for livestock here a lot more than when I was in the States because some really cool and rarely seen fish and inverts come in all the time that you'd never see in America. Oh, and $30 for most any fish would be considered ridiculously expensive! They get to the shop from the ocean a LOT faster and sell a LOT cheaper in most cases.