LFS (local fish store) Jakarta Part 1!

When I stay in Jakarta, I like to frequent the local fish stores. My friend Gili has a 240 gallon reef tank and does water changes every week. So once a week, we head out to a certain area in Jakarta, and buy water and check out the corals and fish. There are a few LFS's scattered around town too, but the majority of the marine dealers are all concentrated in one location. Here you can buy water, live rock, fish, corals, and dry goods.


You can call this "fish row". One section is all marine and the other half is freshwater. Then there are dealers near the sidewalk selling anything from dead coral skeletons to live turtles. I've even seen live baby sea turtles for sale. It is illegal but who is going to enforce it?

Here we are at one of the better high end reef shops. All the corals and fish (if they can catch) are for sale in the display tanks. Most of the corals in these shops carry West Java corals, meaning mostly common and green - brown.

One of the trips to the LFS's was with my customer from Singapore. His name is Ace, pictured here with my friend Gili. He owns and operates a couple of high end reef shops. Ace's company is called Harlequin Marine. More on Ace on part 2 of this post (tomorrow).

Pretty impressive protein skimmer for an Indonesian fish store. I think it was imported in.

Again mostly common corals for sale. However, once in a while I'll find a unique and unusal piece. I found such a piece on this trip and you can see it further down the post.

One store specializes in imports. These are flame angels from Christmas Island. Along with these, yellow tangs are shipped out from Hawaii to here. These are the two very popular rare fish. Australian and Caribbean fish are also high in demand too, especially queen angels and harlequin tusks.

Along the sidewalk area, dealers also sell kois. Some of these are local breeds, while the real nice ones are from Japanese broodstocks. The Indonesians are experts at breeding koi and have produced very nice show quality specimens. There is another part of Jakarta where these kois are specialized and sold. Gili actually has many of them in his pond at home.

Check out these huge centipedes! At first I thought these were being sold as pets, but no they are food for arowanas. They were huge, from four to eight inches long.

And here is the bad boy, an Asian arowana. Sorry for the blurry picture, taking photos of fish is harder than taking pictures of corals!


The nice lime green trachy caught my eye in this display tank.

Here is a close up shot. I was going to buy it and export it, but at the time, our Jakarta farm wasn't ready. We went back a week later and it was gone. Oh well, you snooze you loose!

A dealer was selling this pile of liverock. Normally here, the rock is sold per piece, not by weight. I'll do a complete post on Indonesian liverock soon.

A very nice looking Heteractis magnifica (ritteri anemone). Believe it or not, finding one with purple base like this is hard to find around here. I still don't understand as I used to see many back in the US at the wholesalers.

My wife complains that I don't put enough pictures of me on my blog. So here you go honey, your handsome husband!

Sorry for the bad picture, but this is a mystery coral. I found this in one of the display tanks and had to buy it. It looks like a plating lobo. Any suggestions would be welcome! I still have it in our Jakarta facility.

Here it is again. It is green with whitish centers. Definitely a strange LPS.

On that trip with Ace, we discovered these huge headed tubastreas! They were gorgeous and looked almost fake. They were bright orange and on another trip, we found bright red ones. The trick is to track down the source so we can buy at a cheaper price. Remember we have resell and make money.

Here it is again. Notice how big the heads are? Compare my thumb to the half opened polyp! I hope these are still around, as Ace wants a bunch!

Coming up tomorrow, strange turtles and true percula clowns at the LFS.

cheers,
Eddie