Bad LFS and M.I.A. Cleaner.

This past week/weekend I went up to Raleigh. My girlfriend had a sudden and unexpected death in the family and to show my support, I took the Jeep and drove it 400 miles to meet her and her family for the funeral. The trip wasn't completely bad. She learned some nice stuff about her dad and we saw and stayed with some of our friends while we were up there. Of course the trip could have been made for a better reason, but overall, it is what it is.

While I was there, I took a short break to visit Fish World of N.C. which is located in NE Raleigh. Does it sound insensitive? (She WAS taking a nap...) Anyway, while I was there, I thought maybe I'd check out the Raleigh scene but unfortunately I didn't know much about the town and my Google search only pulled up a couple of locations. Anyway, Fish World (www.fishworldnc.com) is really a terrible store. The website said they moved to a new location which is supposed to be all cool and large but I got there and was shocked by almost everything I saw, in a bad way.

First of all, the staff was less than friendly. One person acknowledged I was there and the rest kind of just ignored me. Was it the color of my skin? Hrmm, let's not go there. Anyway, the tanks there were definitely built with people in mind. By that, I mean the tanks were all about 10 gallons each filled with some sand and 2 fish in each tank and that was about it. No rocks, no lights, nada. Most of the fish I saw were breathing heavy, laying on the sand, or hiding behind the single outflow pipe that was in the tank. This was not a good sign.

About half of the tanks there also had cleaner wrasses which as far as I'm concerned means they could care less about owning a responsible store. This was also the only store I've seen that had 5 sea apples (the ones that will wipe out your entire tank if dead), and they also had a tub of snails of which, the tub had no algae for them to feed on.

I won't even get into the coral selection... Let's just say they pretty much had nothing that impressed me besides for what an LFS shouldn't be doing.

Yesterday, a day or two after our return, I realized that my cleaner shrimp is no longer in the tank. This is funny because I didn't see any carcass or shrimp bits, just the lack of white antennas that I am so used to. Okay, so I didn't feed my tank for three days cause I don't own an auto feeder, but I totally didn't expect this. The dottyback (my primary suspect) is going to have to go soon.