I am in central Oklahoma, USA. If anyone knows where I can get them I am ready to buy.
I have seen a few wholesalers in the SE Asia who have them (or at least claim to). The ones I have seen usually want to sell you around 2-600 of them. I would be willing to go in with some people to get a few. I have imported things before but those were hard goods and I never have done anything like that with live fish. I know there are import controls on certain animals and plants that they do not have on hard goods. If a car part sits there for two weeks it won't hurt it much, but one is on a reallly short leash time wise with fish. I would hate to go through this and then have something I was unfamiliar with stop things at Customs and kill the fish. I am not sure I personally would want to try to do this without the help of someone who was very familiar. In fact I think I would want to watch someone experienced do it first, before I tried.
Most of the fish I am after seem to come from the SE Asia region. Maybe if there are enough of us we could get together, combine orders and buy a few normally hard to get around here species. Personally, I would want to have some attorney (preferably one familiar with import/export) and a bank (to handle some sort of escrow for the funds) to make sure no one is bit financially. That could end up being a lot of work. I do not think I have the time to do this and I definitely do not have the expertise, but I would be willing to participate.
Then again, if we got enough people together to do the above, maybe we could get some fish importer or store who does this routinely to handle the thing for us. I am sure most of it from the importer's thinking is just what they would do with 4-600 fish that they do not know there is a market for. I would imagine that one of them would be willing to add a few species to one of their orders if they knew they could sell them. There is an importer here in the US that I have done business with on the internet several times. Their name is Aquariumfish.net (
http://www.aquariumfish.net/home.htm). In all my dealings with them they have been very conscientious, have handled any problems quickly (once they accidentally used USPS to ship instead of another carrier a I requested - they replaced the dead fish immediately and threw in a few extras), and I have always gotten good fish from them. I would bet they or someone like them could be persuaded to place the order if we could get a group to commit to buy the loaches when they get here.
Either way, someone is going to have to coordinate this. At the least they would have to get the order together and work out some arrangement with the importer for us to individually pay for this. At the worst they would have to collect the funds too. I would bet something could be done with an importer to have them deal with us individually as they do with their other customers. I just do not know how interested and flexible they would be with something like this. Maybe a good place to start would be someone volunteering to collect orders and prepare a list (buyer's name, email address, type(s) of loach(es) and the quantity wanted). We oculd see where we stood numbers wise and then contact a few domestic importers to see if anyone was interested in placing the order for us.
If I had the time and tank space I would not mind importing a few then selling the extras. Unfortunately I just don't right now. All I know is there are a couple of really neat loaches I would love to have and all you see in the stores are the standard ones they have been importing for the last 40 years.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks
chask