Saboteur in Toronto fish store kills 700 fish, corals
11 Comments
At a Scarborough pet store in Toronto, over 700 fish and over 200 corals died after what fish store owners say a chemical was put into the aquarium water. “The dead fish were discovered after customers alerted employees to a strange, bleach-like smell coming from the back room that houses aquariums at the five-month-old store. Co-owner Adam Gharavi said he was shocked and outraged. “We can’t open, we’re a fish store with no fish,” he said. “I want (whoever did this) to see this and be ashamed.” Interestingly no chemical has been found , there is no survelliance video handy and there haven’t been any witnesses.
via [Frag.it, Toronto Sun]
Very sad that people feel the need to do this to other stores or new stores. Not only because of the loss of fish and revenue, but just because a person is willing to do this to someone else.
March 5th, 2010 at 10:21 am
This is not the first time something like this has happened but I hope it is the last. Saw this same thing happen over 20 years ago in NY when a competitor sent a stooge to drop ammonia in the tanks of his competition. Very sad indeed. When stuff like this happens it hurts us all.
March 5th, 2010 at 11:17 am
new fish store very close to others? something sounds, well, fishy to me.
March 5th, 2010 at 11:43 am
This is very sad and my heart goes out to the owners of this shop, but there’s something very strange about this story, especially the “no chemical has been found” part. Seems like there’s a lot of important details missing. Part of me even wonders if this was a chemical reaction between an amine based stress coat product used on new fish and regenerated purigen or something like that (which has been known to happen).
It’s just strange that if enough time transpired between someone doing this then leaving the store unseen, then more customers coming in and seeing a bunch of dead fish and reporting a bleach smell, it seems that someone wasn’t keeping an eye on the sales floor. I don’t mean to point blame at the the employees– I’ve worked retail stores like this and understand that you can’t always just sit at the register and follow every person around. There’s endless chores to be done. But unless this place is a huge store, just seems like a lot of time transpired between this happening and the employees realizing it.
I guess the lesson here is if you run a retail store with limited staff and can’t have someone “eyeing the till” at all times, security cameras are a must.
March 5th, 2010 at 11:50 am
Its sad that stores NEED to have security cameras in their stores, but people will continue to do crap like this. Or stealing corals, or brazenly grabbing corals and dashing out the door.
March 5th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
If bleach was used, there wouldn’t really be any evidence. Afterall, bleach is mearly salt and water. It could have an initial affect and then nothing.
Either way, it’s pretty sad to lose that much livestock. This is going to make a major dent on this store.
March 5th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Pardon my ignorance, but how is “bleach merely salt and water?” Raj?
March 5th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
what about ozone? that would turn to O2 quickly and leave no trace.. but a big enough unit would have likely been noticed.
March 6th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Maybe this Anthony (take from Wikipedia):
It decomposes when heated or evaporated to form sodium chlorate and sodium chloride:
3 NaClO –> NaClO3 + 2 NaCl
March 6th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Something is a little fishy here….no pun intended. If you smell bleach / chlorine in your fish store, and notice your fish are starting to breathe heavy and/or die, do you not immediately dump a bunch of dechlorinator into your systems? I worked in several LFS (granted, many moons ago) and while certainly not commonplace, it was not unheard of for a competitor or disgruntled customer to try to wipe your systems out. I find it hard to believe that this guy was so oblivious to what was going on in his store that all the stuff died before he could do anything? It is a fish store, right? I assume they have at least one shelf with dechlorinating products on it, most likely more than one.
Honestly, my second thought when hearing this story was that it was an insurance job. If that turns out to be the case, this guy should never be allowed back in the business again.
I guess regardless of what transpired, it sucks that so much had to die.
Freaking Canadians! Maybe they were celebrating their Hockey Gold medals and got a little careless with the bleach?
March 7th, 2010 at 8:17 am
[...] Saboteur in Toronto fish store kills 700 fish, corals [...]
March 9th, 2010 at 6:11 am