Painted glass fish are a beautiful reminder of just how unscrupulous some fish wholesalers can be.
If you have ever been to a large pet retailer, you have probably seen them; translucent fish with brightly colored sides or backs. They are sold as painted or colored glass fish, but other species also look too good to be true.
First-time fish buyers get excited about the beauty of these fish and excitedly put them in their aquarium, only to have them sicken and die a short time later.
Creating these colored fish is a practice that is nothing less than animal cruelty.
What are painted glass fish, and what can you do about them? Get the facts and the list of actions you can take here.
It is sad what kinds of things are done in the pet trade to make a little extra money. The dyeing of translucent fish is one of them.
Most of the dyeing operations are scattered across Asia. Thousands of fish are dyed and imported to the US and the rest of the world, where they wind up in aquariums in large retail tropical fish stores.
The beautiful fish that defy nature are the result of the injection of colorful dyes under their skin. The dyes are often the same ones used for printer ink cartridges.
Glassfish like glass minnows and glass tetras are the target for these operations. Since they have translucent bodies, the injected colored ink dupes consumers into believing they are seeing a unique color mutation.
This is sometimes called juicing. The dye can cause kidney damage to the fish or weaken its immune system, so they are highly susceptible to fin rot and diseases such as ich.
Introducing these fish into your home aquarium can quickly spread disease to the rest of your ornamental fish.
There can also be extremely high rates of diseases that are passed from fish to fish by repeated uses of the same syringe and needle on hundreds of fish.
When you consider the relative size of the needle used to the size of the fish, it could compare to someone sticking you with a needle about the diameter of a pencil.
There are other artificial ways of adding color to fish, and all of them are painful.
