Livestock from Chinatown?

Hi all!

It recently dawned on me some of my local fishmarkets carry a large variety of live, temperate livestock. China Rockfish, lingcod, flounders, mussles, clams, oysters, prawns, winkles, abalone, sea cucumber, crabs, lobster, limpets and more.

Anyone ever looked at this as a source? Do any of these jump out as good livestock to cycle my tank with?

yes china markets are good places to look for livestock. watch the oysters, some of them have little anemones on them to.

I have heard of many temarine aquarists acquiring livestock from Chinatowns.

I would just make sure they were freshly caught .

I wouldn't do any fish, but I have been looking for Abalone everywhere!

Abalone are illegal in California. Hunted to near extinction they are finally on the recovery.

abalone are hard to keep to. water has to be clean and filled with phytoplankton at the same time. that is kind of hard to do. lol

where has everyone been? come on post.

Jacobnano wrote:I wouldn't do any fish, but I have been looking for Abalone everywhere!

Abalone are easy to get here. There is a huge asian supermarket that has them much of the time.

They are imported abalone. They are illegal to fish here too.

Did they have any chitons or limpets?

Michael Milligan wrote:

Jacobnano wrote:I wouldn't do any fish, but I have been looking for Abalone everywhere!

Abalone are easy to get here. There is a huge asian supermarket that has them much of the time.

They are imported abalone. They are illegal to fish here too.

What are the size requirements to sell them there? How small can you get them?

I suspect they are more of a tropical variety. Didn't look too hard when last there. They are quite costly, and I wasn't a reefer at the time. They were pretty big though... 2-3 inches. From memory. I don't know where they are from.

I need to make my chiller, then look for a fish or two to cycle my tank with. Right now there is just a fishless method... only cuz the water is 23 degrees Celsius and anything will die.

I'm looking at a China rockfish to cycle the tank... likely? There are lots of flounders too. I can get flounders with a hook and line, but this is much easier.

I'm sure they are a sub-tropical species.

Just finished some reading online. What I saw could be a Chilean Abalone... not a true abalone.

Well its still cool! I have relatives who lived in chile.

Well... get your temperate tank up and running and in time I just might ship you one

For those who don't know what Chilean Abalones are: they are a species in the rock snail family. Here's a wiki article and some pictures from the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concholepas_concholepas



An interesting species though, even if they're not true abalones.

And I imagine they are delicious too.

I've never been a big eater of gastropods..

NO!? too bad. I guess you wouldn't be interested in some of my home reared escargots!

I'm a cook/chef. Moreover, I'll eat just about anything. There is is a Cantonese saying, "if it crawls, flies, for swims... eat it!" lol

Oh boy. The only seafood I eat is fish and.. fish. As well as the occasional octopus and squid. Clams and shellfish really aren't that bad either. Just not "escargots"!

Although I wouldn't mind them as ornamental pieces in an aquarium .

When I round up some batteries I'll post some pics in the freshwater forum.

Sounds great.