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I've just got back from a business trip to Singapore. As I had a bit of free time on my last day I decided to check out their aquatic stores. I pulled out the local Yellow Pages and was very surprised that while Singapore is a relatively small place there were a huge number of stores to choose from, almost 4 pages worth!

Anyway I found a couple not far from my hotel and I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the stores and what they had to offer. I was drooling all over the place! Great selection of fish, but frustrating as they had a lot of beauties that cannot be found here in Jakarta. Particularly a lot of different Apistos which I have never seen here and a lot of harder to find barbs (at least here in Indonesia). One pleasant surprise was the complete lack of Flowerhorns. What was a craze just a short while ago seems to have totally disappeared and has been replaced by a fad for Arrowanas. And the prices are just crazy ! I saw one that was labeled as a Wild Blue with a price tag of SG$9,888, that is about $5,600 US !!!!! The cheapest I saw was about SG$4,000. Granted these were truly magnificent fish, stunningly beautiful but no way Iwould pay that kind of money for any fish, unless it pooped gold nuggets !!!

Another interesting one was a tank marked Jumbo Rams. They were HUGE Blue Rams, a bit rounder then usual but basically 3-4inch Blue Rams. Dread to think how they got them that big though.

Anyway they had tons of stuff I haven’t seen available here so I put a bit of a dent in the credit card. My best buy was a solution to my biggest problem. Living in the tropics I have a constant battle with high temps, up to now Ihave been running at 30oC. While this did not seem to be a problem for the fish, although their metabolisms could have being going nuts, it was certainly an issue for a lot of the plants. Lately it has been getting warmer and the plants were most definitely suffering. Anyway I found this gizmo called a Plant Cooling Fan which was basically like one of those fans you have to cool your computer, but a bit bigger. Great thing about it is that it clips onto the top edge of the aquarium glass and is fully adjustable for direction and angle. I was a bit worried it might be very noisy or vibrate too much upsetting the fish. Once I set it up it is very smooth no vibration at all and not that noisy at all, does not bother the fish at all (except when I put in some flake and it gets driven across the surface of the water with all the fish chasing after it like Olympic sprinters- pretty hilarious). Best of all, it works! Beautifully! I am now down to an almost perfect 27oC and at $20 much better value then a $400 chiller unit!

My other great buy was some beautiful big bunches of Anubias. The only ones I could find here were tiny little things with 3 or 4 very small leaves. The plants in the LFSI looked at were all kept in Co2 injected tanks and were in perfect condition. I got 3 big bunches each with about 30 leaves per bunch and 2 of them were flowering and a snip at $5 each. Had to smuggle them into Indonesia as it is illegal to bring in plants without a quarantine, it was a close call but I got them past the ever vigilant sleeping Indonesian customs officer!!

The only draw back was getting back to a tank that had no maintenance for a week! It was completely overgrown and shabby looking. All the fish were fine though. They must have got pretty hungry with no food for 5 days and decided to live on salad, as a few of the more tender plants were reduced to stubs. Took me about 6hrs of work to tidy everything up and re-scape so I could fit in my beautiful new Anubias. But worth the effort as the tank now looks better then ever. And have a bunch of fish glad to see my feeding hand back! As soon as I walked in they were dancing around the glass like a bunch of excited puppies the dwarf Gourami got so excited he jumped clear out of the water and luckily he landed on one of the tank support bars from where he gave me a doleful look as if to say “now look what you made me do!” before flinging himself back in the water and going back to his usual routine of spitting water out at me until he gets fed



Last edited by bensaf at 27-Sep-2004 04:33

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Some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue.

Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability.

Wow. Thanks for the interesting read mate.

Oh and watch for the evaporation caused by the cooling fan.

-- Gomer

Tooo funny! I loved especially the comment about the ever-vigilant sleeping customs officer!

Gomer,
I see what you mean about the evaporation Did a water change yesterday so it was full to the brim. Come home this evening and I had to top up by 4 gals ! that had already evaporated.

Small price to pay though to get my temp under control .

Last edited by bensaf at 27-Sep-2004 09:11

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Some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue.

Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability.