Guest Author - Jilly Florio

How do you ship aquarium fish through the mail? That depends on what type of fish they are and the temperatures of the area your fish will pass through while being shipped.

The best packing material is styrofoam - whether peanuts or blocks that you cut to fit. They provide insulation from both heat and cold. Newspaper can get soggy and is just not as good an insulator. I would only use newspaper if I was doing 'damp' shipping - in particular, for shipping freshwater clams, snails, or mangrove seedlings.

Styrofoam also provides a more stable base for your living fishes - they don't slosh as much as they would in a newspaper matrix.

Make sure your plastic bag is double, or even better - triple-bagged, for safety.

If you are shipping air-breather fish, you will need to ensure there is an airbubble in the bag, or these fish will actually drown. Here are your typical air-breathers - any kind of betta, paradise fish and gouramies. Fill their bags with just enough water to cover the fish, plus a smidgen extra! Use O2 from your local petstore (ie, PetSmart has this air all ready to go and won't charge you to use it), or make completely sure you can capture atmospheric O2 in the bag when you quickly close it. Breathing into the bag won't do it - that's mostly CO2.

Gill-breathing fish do well with breather bags - you can find these online.

For cold weather, ship overnight or express, and add heat packs (again, available online). Hot weather requires overnight shipping. In clement weather you can try priority mail, but only the hardy fish should be subjected to this, since the shipping can take 2-3 days.

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This inexpensive book would make a nice companion to any fish you ship: