SSC For the Win

The fish in your local fish store all come from somewhere. It seems obvious when you say it / read it, but for the most part, people don't often think about exactly how that fish got to the store (or even to your favorite public aquarium!). This is a great shame because the collection, export, import and distribution of these marine critters is a complex and multi-tiered process. The moment one of these fish is caught, or an invertebrate is collected is the start of a chain of custody. A chain that ultimately ends in your aquarium! The time each aquatic specimen spends traveling is directly correlated to how well they're able to acclimate to your aquarium! In a nutshell, this is why we use the acronym SSC, which you have definitely seen if you've been looking around this website for any length of time.

SSC stands for Short Supply Chain. We use this designation for anything that reaches the point of export within 24 hours of being collected. This is a big deal, but to really get why these matters, we need to get back in touch. Not everyone who imports fish does it the right way. The process isn't standardized and the fishermen and collector groups that catch and export fish and invertebrates all work on different models. In the beginning, most collectors were indigenous people, often sustenance fishers who branched out into catching ornamental fish. These collections’ locations are often in extremely remote locations and so in order to sell these fish, they had to be sold to a middleman, who then might sell to another middleman and perhaps another who then sells to a conglomerator who might sell to another one, who then finally sells it to an exporter. The technology for handling these fish was extremely rudimentary, so they were usually without any climate control, filtration or even food or oxygen supplementation. These fish and inverts could go through many hands, poor handling conditions and weeks before they ever got to export. This pace, lack of technology, and transit times weren't conducive to fish that even survived, let alone arriving to your aquarium in good shape.

At Quality Marine, this is NOT how we operate. In all of the supply chains we utilize, we strive for the shortest transport times and the best conditions along the way. We often lend our expertise, supply resources and the benefit of our long history toward making every one of our supply chains better. For half a century now, we've left no stone unturned when it comes to bringing the best, healthiest fish to our partner stores and public aquariums. We'll never stop working to improve our processes and the methodology of everyone we work with. We support the most sustainably harvested and managed collection sites. We source livestock directly from collectors and collector groups whenever possible, regardless of whether or not we can qualify those fish as SSC.

Thinking and operating this means that transit times get reduced to hours, or at the most a couple days instead of weeks. The technological increases that we make available to these collectors allow them to take better care of the animals they capture during their much shorter trips. This all eliminates inconsistencies in care and as a result, it wildly increases survival rate. That in turn reduces pressure on the environments these animals come from. If we can guarantee that an animal made it to export from collection in less than 24 hours, it gets the most important label we put on a specimen: SSC.

This isn't the cheapest way to do this job, but it universally results in the healthiest animal. These fish haven't been without food. This means they're robust, well fed with strong immune systems that haven't been stressed from long periods of high temps, low oxygen, and a lack of sustenance. The fish have their feeding triggers still intact, making it much easier to continue getting them the nutrition they require. We've been honing our process here for decades and have data going back to the beginning that we've used and still use to better our processes. We have species specific shipping and acclimation protocols for every fish you can imagine in your aquarium and some you've probably never even heard of. And yes, we take in-house husbandry and feeding here very seriously too, but that's another article.

We are confident that we sell your Local Fish Store the highest quality livestock in the world. All the fish and invertebrates we sell are sourced as sustainably as is possible, and the SSC ones are the best of the best. If this matters to you, and we hope it does and you're looking for the highest quality livestock you can get for your display, you need to look for Quality Marine labels at your favorite local fish store. When you want the best of the best, make sure that label says SSC.