Shrimp for beginners
Cherry shrimp are easy, busy and good for a small tank, if you keep three simple rules.
Inside our quarantine room
Why every fish waits 14 days behind the shop, and what we watch for in that time.
Behind the counter on College Road there is a room most customers never see. It holds 40 bare glass tanks on steel racks, each with a sponge filter, a heater and a label with the date the fish arrived and the breeder they came from.
Fish travel a long way before they reach us. A tetra may be bred near Pune or Kolkata, bagged, driven to a wholesaler and then to us. That journey stresses them, and stress brings out diseases they were carrying quietly. If we put them straight into the display tanks, those diseases spread to every fish in the shop and then to your home.
So every batch spends 14 days in quarantine. Pallavi checks every tank each morning before opening, looking for white spots, clamped fins, fish that hide or refuse food. We keep the water slightly warmer than usual, change a third of it every two days, and treat only the tanks that need it.
In a normal month, about one batch in eight shows a problem. We treat that batch and start its 14 days again. Very occasionally a batch is too weak and we do not sell it at all. This is why our fish cost a little more than at a pet shop on the highway, and why we can tell you the date your fish arrived and how they ate on each of those days.
