Several years ago Jake Adams decided that we needed an aquarium holiday celebrating the local fish store. It’s where many of us, as well as most new hobbyists got their start. The LFS provides a trusted source of advice, assistance with setting up gear and opportunities to inspect your critters before you bring them home. Local Fish Store Saturday was born, an homage to Small Business Saturday, concentrating on the foundation of our hobby.
Grab a friend and spend some time journeying to a few local stores. Making the fish store rounds is a great way to explore what’s available in your local market while making friends along the way. While you are there, pick up a few items: fish food, supplies, a new coral or fish for yourself. A few dollars will help support a local small business.
Clean up Crew – Most reefers rely on a whole army of invertebrates to perform cleaning duties on their aquariums. Some of these inverts don’t have the longest life spans so if it’s been a while, consider bolstering your populations of snails, emerald crabs, hermit crabs, peppermint shrimp, turbos, astrea, sea hare, sand sifting starfish, and if you can find them, abalones make a great algae eating machine.
Food – All the corals and fish in our reef tanks need to eat so stocking up on food while the prices are favorable is always a good buy. We always use #LFSSaturday to stock up on prepared foods like flakes and pellets, we never have enough frozen foods including brine and mysis shrimp, live foods like black worms, phytoplankton and copepods always make a nice treat, and while you’re at it don’t forget to top up your supplies of coral foods as well.
Additives, Dips & Salt – If you’ve got any kind of saltwater aquarium, certainly you’ll be needing some salt mix for making seawater and water changes so grab some of that precious white powder that you know you’re going to need. Also if you’ve got a reef tank, which most of you reading this will, calcium, buffer, magnesium and trace elements don’t come from the tap so you know you’re going to need those additives, be they dry or premixed, and if you’re the kind of reefer who is still collecting make sure you have enough disinfecting coral dips to last you throughout the year.
There’s already plenty of reef and fish people who regularly see each other on weekend visits to the aquarium store but what if we took this a step further and made a point to see each other one day every year? We can’t think of a better time than #LFSSaturday to purposefully go around to all of our local aquarium retailers and show them how much it means to have them in our communities.
We are very much looking forward to continuing our annual tradition of visiting as many reef aquarium stores throughout the wider Denver metro area and seeing how all these establishments have changed or held up since the last visit. We hope to see and meet many ReefBuilders fans while getting out into our local reef aquarium community. Happy hunting to those of us who’ll be keeping a keen eye out for used livestock like fish and corals that have been traded in to our LFS.
