Shipping Bags & Fish Dying

[TwoTankAmin]

This is a bit of a long tale but I think it needs to be that way to have it make sense. I am recounting these experiences as much to determine if they are happening to anybody else as well as for getting feedback from folks.

Let me begin with a short amount o background info. I have been keeping fish since Jan 2001. In that time I have had many spawns in my tanks which includes every species of pleco I have kept. From 2003 through Catcon I have likely sold over 500 common tank bristlenose. Since Feb. 2007 I have sold about 400 FI zebra plecos, about 100 L450, about 100 H contrdens and a bunch of other assorted plecos and I have just begun with l236 offspring. I would think over the years I have easily bagged well over 1,000 fish of all kinds but mostly plecos. I had lost only one zebra being bagged in all that time and that one I dinged when catching it and thought it was not injured. Turned out it was and it is the only zebra I ever bagged that did not reach its destination alive until this past 10 months.

I have my own private well with super water. I have digital monitors as well. I am able to and have regularly put water directly from the tap into tanks and used it to bag fish. When I bag fish I pull tanks apart removing the contents to water filled containers. The water is all from my tap and during the netting process I will also take the opportunity to do a good vac. So I refill the tanks when done. I fill my fish use only buckets and larger containers with water and I use the same water to bag the fish and to refill tanks.

With the exception of the summer after 911 when a number of bn shipments arrived DOA, I have lost very few fish in bags whether shipped or transported by individuals.Back then I chalked it up to a potentially "bad" spawn or how the USPO was dealing with boxes to insure they would not explode. Now I am not so sure.

Last year I was a room seller at CatCon. I brought a large number of fish to sell, especially plecos. I ordered a lot of bags in advance of the event. Having used many of them up that weekend, I reordered bags not long after.

When I arrived at the event less than 24 hours after bagging fish, I began to put things into tanks and discovered a number of dead plecos to include some P compta, an L450 and a couple of zebras. Because I had bagged so many fish getting ready, I assumed I might have done something wrong to cause the deaths. For the return trip I repeated the process, this time with dechlored hotel water, the same water the fish spent the convention in. Once again the fish were bagged for under a 24 hours. When I arrived home I had more dead fish. All the rummy nose tetras, and an assortment of plecos to include a few 236 and zebras.

Fast forward to the NEC weekend this past March. At this event I decided to sell out of the vendor room. This time life was easier as it was under a 90 minute drive. To this event I brought plecos, and had delivered from a well know seller a number of Amano shrimp, assorted Nerite snails, rummy nose tetras and Hasbrosus cory. I lost almost nothing on the way to the show, but then the fish were not in their bags very long. However, things which I sold and bagged and were then taken to the room of the buyer started to die over night. In addition the redline barb tank appeared to crash and they died over the 1st night when I was back home. Corys were brought back with a few dead and the rest doing badly. I had a another vendor replace them from his stock and paid for them. Because the time in bags was short in both directions, pleco losses were small, another zebra and a 236.

Fast forward to this weekend and the ACA event. Working with a well known seller and on my own we preseo;d 14 zebra plecos. % ot these were from my f1 adult tank, the other from two different growout tanks. All the fish were bagged individually. Also there was one nag with 2 l236 at 1.5 inch and a bag 2with 3 L450s of a similar size. All were well bagged in clean new water with nothing added but a small piece of Poly-Filter fiber. The fish were bagged Thursday morning between 9:30 am and 1:30 pm, taken at about 2:30 and at the event by about 5. the5 adult zebras were collected that evening and unbagged into a tank in the buyer's room. Friday morning at about 10:30 I got a call from the person handling my fish, the buyer for the other 9 zebras had arrived and when the styro was opened, all of the 4 biggest (1.75+ inch) zebras were dead. The 5 smaller ones were still alive as were the 236 and 450s. However, it was agreed the fish should immediately be rebagged. The bags were from another supplier and the water was now dechlored hotel water. I told the buyer to take the five fish and id they lived in his tanks for at least a week we would settle up. On the way home one of the five fish died. he reported the other 4 went to cover as soon as they went into his tank.

That evening I heard from my associate at the hotel. One of the 236 in the new bags had died, Only the L450s were still intact. I was also informed the 4/5 F1 adult zebra plecos in the buyers' tank had died overnight. I refunded their money.

Now here are all of the sort of details one might want to know about:
1. I have used my tap water untreated since day one in the hobby and never had issues in tanks or bags until recently.
2. I store bags as they came packaged, I further put them into plastic bags like one gets for their groceries and then into an open box in the storage area where I have two inwall tanks running.
3. I normally ship with a small amount of Amquel in the bag water. This last time i chose not to use any Amquel instead adding a small piece of Poly-Filter.
4. For both of the above events I brought cycled filters for all the display/sales tanks. I maintain a small bio-farm to jeep additional filters cycled and ready to use.
5. I will dump my bag water into the show tanks when the trip is short.
6. For the NEC event I brought my own ta water using my normal RO/di storage containers.
7. I use heat packs as needed and tend not to ship during the Thanksgiving (USA) and New year period. I will never ship when its extremely hot.
8. Since I got two orders of bags on top of the one's I already had, and because I tend to mix them easily, I have no way to associate any bag with any specific purchase.
9. On a fair price basis for the sale amount for my F1s and the other fish I purchased for resale, I have now lost over $4,000 worth of fish.

All of the deaths I am discussing here clearly happened in relation to fish being bagged in my bags. It appears that the longer the fish are in the bags, the more that die in them and the more that may have still survive have died after being unbagged or rebagged in different bags and water. So I have two issues that I would like to have some input on from folks with a decent amount of experience with shipped fish.

First, does anybody see any other reasonable explanation besides contamination from the bags?

Second, this problem seems to happen for me mostly, but not exclusively with sucker mouth cats. Since these fish tend to suck onto the bag during transport, is it possible that may be an important factor? Might the fish be causing the release of chemicals or some form of breakdown in the bag integrity which greatly exacerbates the potential for chemical issues to occur by sucking on and/or rasping the bags?

I have brainstormed this problem with several people and we all keep coming back to the same thing, its the bags. The upshot is I am throwing out all of my current stock of bags and replacing them from a different supplier. I have related most of this information to the vendor from whom I bought the bags. I know he is on a road trip, so I do not expect an answer from him until later next week. I believe the vendor is not directly responsible for the problems if it is indeed the bags.

Edit: There is a July 9 article on the subject of killer fish bags which only deals with saltwater fish. It reported in Amazonas/Reef to Rainforest here http://www.reef2rainforest.com/2015/07/ ... -concerns/

I have reached out to the corresponding author to aks if they have any data on fw fish in bags or plans to investigate. I mentioned the idea thatthe sucker mouth fish may cause or exacerbate the release of chemicals. If and when I hear back I will report this.

[Marine590622]

You could put a volume of water in a bag and a volume of water from the same source into a glass jar and then take them to a lab to have them tested. Explain what you suspect and they should be able to determine if you got a bad batch of bags with chemicals leaching into the water from the bag.

Here in Wisconsin the state water lab runs tests for $20

[TwoTankAmin]

I appreciate the suggestion. However, the problem is the bags were mixed from various orders. Within the orders them selves there are often multiple containers holding the same size bag. There is no way to know if all the bags come from the same "master batch." My vendor has a continuous supply of bags in stock and I assume some shipments going out may contain a mixture of bags in terms of their manufacturing run.

The other issue here is that this would ignore the possibility that how the plecos suck onto, and perhaps occasionally rasp, the bags might be what causes things to release into the water. I have had way more issues with plecos than all other fish combined. Perhaps when there is a problem with a given set of bags the pleco mouthing simply accelerates the release. I do not know.

Moreover, the fish which I bagged last were the 5 adult zebras. These were put into a tank about 5 hours later. 4 died in that tank a day or so later. The fish that survived the best of the entire bunch were the smallest fish. Logic tells me smaller fish have a smaller mouth and would suck/rasp the surfaces available much less that adults.

I am aware of one other person who had this sort of an issue several years ago. This person is a seller who works from home. Many shipments of fish that went out arrived as DOAs. They were all going out the same new shipment of bags during a two week period.

[Bas Pels]

The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that there is something wrong with the bags.

After all, the procedures are precisely the same as always, and the water is also the same.

[TwoTankAmin]

I have heard back from Craig A. Downs, Ph.D. re the bag issue. There are several key pieces of information in his reply i would like to share:

We have gotten 7-8 dozen of emails similar to your inquiry........
There really isn’t much difference in leachate rate between saltwater and freshwater. Actually, it goes a little bit faster with the freshwater. Two things can contribute to the toxicity of a bag: bag composition, and composition of the slip agent.......
In some slip agents, there may be nonylphenol contamination, or it is an intentional additive........
Different species have different sensitivities to nonyl phenol; some are more sensitive than other. I don’t know if sucking could cause a leachate rate increase, but it doesn’t sound too far-fetched. Kind of seems probable when you think about.....
Another option is to add 4-6 pellets of medical grade activated carbon that has been primed to each bag.

The other interesting piece of information included was to point me towards the new SeaChem bags as one possibility. He clearly stated that

I got an email from a colleague who sent me the attached ad. I do not know anything about these bags, and this in no way is an endorsement of these bags. You may want to test them out.

SeaChem now makes a product called Success bags. They are a "nonylphenol free" bag which comes with a pictoral instruction for acclimating fish on it. I have chatted with SeaChem's tech support and the bags are designed to be a retail delivery product. As Such they come in only one size- a 2.5 mil 6 x 16 inch bag which I see online for about 10 cents a bag.

The other interesting thing Dr. Downs suggested was to do a test with live fish. the problem is, if the bags are at fault, the fish die or are harmed. I cannot bring myself to do this, especially with the fish with which I work. However, I am now about as certain as I can be, short of doing this sort of test, that the issue was the bags.

The final suggestion I got was:

The best way to deal with this is contact the manufacturer directly. Talk to them; explain your concerns. I would assume that good companies want their customers happy, and the good ones will want you to walk away with a good product. Another option is if you require from the vendor/manufacturer FDA food-grade plastics that have been certified for low residue. You could also request “natural” slip agent formulations for the bag (e.g., cornstarch, cellulose, etc).

I will pass this information on to the seller from whom I bought the bags.

I think if this is a real issue within the hobby, then it is incumbent upon us as fish keepers to work together to try and get this problem corrected. We need to spread the word so that this issue is brought to the attention of bag vendors and the manufacturers and to make it clear that we in the hobby need and want a safer bag. This is the only way the situation will ever change. In the end if the price of bags goes up a few pennies per but the loss rate for fish goes down, the trade-off makes great economic sense.

If I were on social media, I would be all over this. however I do post on a few fish sites and I intend to bring this issue to the attention of as many fish keepers I can over the coming months.

[TwoTankAmin]

On the recommendation of a trusted seller who has had this issue before from the same source from whom I buy bags, I have ordered new bags from the supplier to whom they switched. However, I will still test these bags before I put them into general use. I hate to sacrifice fish for this purpose, but I will risk them in the interest of saving more fish lives than I night lose doing this test. I do not want my fish dying because of bags and I do not want folks who get my fish losing them either.

I will bag up two or three small L236 and let them sit in the bags for 48 hours. I will open the bags, discarding the water and put the fish into a cycled tank especially for this purpose and monitor them for the next 8 days. This assumes that the fish survive being bagged.

While I could use L450s, this species seemed to be more resistant than my other Hypans since the three 1.5 inchers I bagged for the ACA all survived as far as I know. Therefore, they may not be the ideal test subjects even though they are of a lesser value.

As always, when I do this test, I will report the results in this thread.

One note, according to Dr. Downs the cost of testing water for nonylphenol is something a lab must do and that is it expensive. I do not think a local water company would be equipped to test for this. And then there is the fact that my local water company is me since I have a private well and not municipal water.

[Viktor Jarikov]

If one knows what chemical they are looking for in an analytical test, it tremendously simplifies the task but still my impression is it'd cost hundreds of dollars. I'd not do it anyway.

Manufacturing plastic, PE in this case, and making bags out of it are complicated chemical and engineering processes. A LOT of things can go wrong and far more things can go wrong just a little bit and fly under the quality control radar. It is understandable that only the most sensitive and demanding applications have a chance to uncover that something's off. Just to name a couple - the chemical reaction (polymerization in this case) is subject to a slew of factors and also depends on the purity of the starting reagents used and the nature of impurities (nothing is 100% pure, really). Extrusion of molten PE into a bag uses chemicals too. Machines go through maintenance or through repair, which may affect (compromise, contaminate, etc.) the first batches of the bags being manufactured until the contamination wears out little by little. Human errors... Etc. It's a can of worms that manufacturing engineers have to deal with. We can't even imagine the complexities of manufacturing of seemingly simple goods.

If the bags you used are not FDA approved for incidental food contact (as e.g., general purpose 100% pure (not really) GE silicone 1 which we use in fish tanks), then the solution may be as simple as switching to the bags that are approved, eat higher cost, and put this horrible ordeal behind.

[TwoTankAmin]

If you look at the research paper they tested using food grade bags. But what you have explained about the manufacturing process makes it easy to understand. In my case i have bagged a lot of fish over the years and only had the deaths I mentioned above. Since I have used a single sources for the bags the whole time, all that may have changes is his supplier. And they there is the fact that this was not a normal thing for me.

What complicates it is apparently it is specific to the ingredient nonylphenol. It also is specific to the bags containing water as in used for live fish purposes. It may also have to do that is fish specific such as using up O and creating co2, or ammonia etc. But the research was pretty adamant that nonylphenol was the cause. This would do nothing in terms of the other potential manufacturing related things that can cause issues.

But here is what the research paper concluded:

5. Conclusion
Our study revealed that NP can migrate from food-safe plastic at levels shown to be toxic to fish. This study highlights that NP could pose a greater risk to humans and wildlife than might be estimated from testing the properties of plastic from a single manufacturer, which is the current paradigm in plastic toxicity testing.

from http://www.haereticus-lab.org/images/No ... re2015.pdf

Basically, if nothing else I get the impression that buying fish bags can, to some extent, be a crap shoot. I am far from being alone in having had this experience. And how would would even know it had happened if the fish are not doa but die days later? Is it that hard manufacture bags without using this one specific ingredient?

[Viktor Jarikov]

I see. Thanks. Yeah, sourcing bags sounds like a gamble that usually pays off but sometimes does not. Everyone is looking for the lowest cost but reputable and honest material supplier and then the lowest cost reputable and honest manufacturer. This is a vicious cycle of chasing profits and industrial competition. Looks like food grade won't cut it. Perhaps medicinal grade? NASA grade? The solution may lie in finding a manufacturer with an ultimate QC but this usually means much more expensive and I am not sure if there is a market. If market demanded it, they would exist logic would argue. May be switching to hermetic Tupperware? Glass? Wouldn't that be fun...

As for nonylphenol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonylphenol it is kind of like soap, i.e., it interacts with both water and oil and dissolves one in the other. The troubling part is the phenol, which is also the bad actor part in the infamous toxin bisphenol A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A . Any kind of phenol is highly toxic. So the nonyl part is not that essential, crudely speaking. The manufacturers may switch to some other phenol as perhaps a frugal band-aid measure and we won't know until another such scientific study is conducted as rigorously as this one.

[TwoTankAmin]

Just a quick thought here. All of the deaths I refer to in this thread did have one thing in common, none were being shipped, Rather they were being transported by hand. When I pack fish for shipping the goal is to use the least amount of water possible to keep shipping costs down. But when I am doing a weekend event I pack differently. Since weight doesn't matter, I over bag. This means I use a much bigger bag than for shipping and I fill it with more water. So there is more water in contact with the surface of the bag than there might be otherwise.

A bigger bag with a lot more water than usual may equate with greater and/or faster leaching. They also offer more surface on which a pleco might suck.

[TwoTankAmin]

Ugh- ran across this study published in 2011.

Environ Health Perspect. 2011 Jul 1
Most Plastic Products Release Estrogenic Chemicals: A Potential Health Problem That Can Be Solved
Chun Z. Yang, Stuart I. Yaniger, V. Craig Jordan, Daniel J. Klein, and George D. Bittner corresponding author

Abstract

Background: Chemicals having estrogenic activity (EA) reportedly cause many adverse health effects, especially at low (picomolar to nanomolar) doses in fetal and juvenile mammals.

Objectives: We sought to determine whether commercially available plastic resins and products, including baby bottles and other products advertised as bisphenol A (BPA) free, release chemicals having EA.

Methods: We used a roboticized MCF-7 cell proliferation assay, which is very sensitive, accurate, and repeatable, to quantify the EA of chemicals leached into saline or ethanol extracts of many types of commercially available plastic materials, some exposed to common-use stresses (microwaving, ultraviolet radiation, and/or autoclaving).

Results: Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products.

Conclusions: Many plastic products are mischaracterized as being EA free if extracted with only one solvent and not exposed to common-use stresses. However, we can identify existing compounds, or have developed, monomers, additives, or processing agents that have no detectable EA and have similar costs. Hence, our data suggest that EA-free plastic products exposed to common-use stresses and extracted by saline and ethanol solvents could be cost-effectively made on a commercial scale and thereby eliminate a potential health risk posed by most currently available plastic products that leach chemicals having EA into food products.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/

More food grade bags leaching.

[TwoTankAmin]

The new bags came over the weekend. I now have a single l235 about 1.375 TL double bagged in a 4x15 inch 3 mil and then another 3 slighlty larger bagged together on a 6x 22inch 3 mil. They are in a styro and kept warm atop an inwall zebra tank - its warm there. I will check the fish in 24 hours.

[TwoTankAmin]

After about 28 hours, longer than most of the fish that died in them, I opened the test box. I am relieved to report that both the single fish and the three in the larger bag were alive and were active when I put the inner bags into their tank to temp acclimate for about 15 minutes while I posted this.

I would say I am ready to start shipping and transporting fish again.

PHEW!

For those interested I got the new bags from Jehmco here http://www.jehmco.com/html/plastic_bags.html I spoke to them before ordering and was told all their bags have been made by the same source for many years.

[bekateen]

Congratulations. I hope these work well.

Cheers, Eric