Everything I know before I go Senile (From 2014)

Paul B

Well-Known Member
Relax! Have Fun! It’s a Hobby!
JUNE 3, 2015 BY PAUL BALDASSANO
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I realize that many of us take our aquarium keeping very seriously, but we have to put it in context and remember that it is just a hobby. A hobby, by definition, is something that gives us pleasure, not something that is necessarily important (except, of course, to us and our fish and corals).

Actually, they are not even our fish and corals. Most are wild creatures that we decided to “help” by rescuing them from the sea, housing them in fake water, feeding them foods that they never saw in nature, and illuminating them artificially while providing a vastly different water movement system and forcing them to live with creatures from the other side of the planet whom they’ve never met.

Between the aquarium and the deep blue sea
Besides that, we love what we do and some of us are very good at it indeed. Many of the fish that we “rescue” actually live longer in our care than they would in the sea. If given a choice, I am not sure whether the fish would want to stay in the sea or come and live with us, given that some of us watch reality TV in full view of our tanks. Who knows whether fish even like reality TV? I mean “Dancing with the Stars” shouldn’t excite fish much, as they don’t have legs. I would assume the National Geographic Channel would be a better choice. Also, some people identify as liberal or conservative, but what about fish? I am not sure how fish would vote. Which party is for which fish?

In contrast to their wild counterparts, fish in our care are prone to the same afflictions that we are due to lack of exercise. My dad, many years ago, was a seafood peddler, and every day he walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, pushing a very heavy cart full of fresh fish, crustaceans, and ice. I just walk over to the fridge and grab a shrimp cocktail. Long before that, our great, great, great, great, etc. grandfathers had to run down game if they wanted to eat. They were in great shape. However, now we can drive our 300-horsepower, 3,000-pound cars three blocks over to McDonalds and drive away with a small part of a cow that someone else caught and made into chopped meat.

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Fish in the sea have a hard time finding food and often have to swim after it and then fight with it while simultaneously fending off other would-be predators that either want to steal their meal or eat them. This happens to wild fish at almost every meal, but in our tanks, they kind of float there, waiting for someone to squirt some food in their face at about the same time every day. That’s how they feed supermodels; they just spray some chicken soup into their face once or twice a day.

Fish, like us, have muscles, and although I am not a fish strength trainer, I assume their muscles atrophy just as ours do if they aren’t used. I think if we released our fish into the sea (please don’t!), they wouldn’t make it ten minutes, as all the rest of the fish (after making fun of them for being in such terrible shape) would be flying past them from all angles to catch prey.

No contest
Many of us lose sight of what we are trying to accomplish by yearning for the best tank, in which everything grows and spawns, corals grow up the walls, and we can have the honor of Tank of the Month or Post of the Month or just Something, Anything of the Month. But this thought is completely wrong. This is not a competition, and there is no end game. I know because I have been doing this for over 60 years and I am still not done. We try desperately to get to the point where we’ve won, where everything is perfect, but if we think like that, we are sure to be disappointed.

Aquarium keeping is like sailing. When you go on a sailboat, you don’t usually even have a destination. It’s the act of sailing that is the fun. If we actually get anywhere, that is great, but then if we needed to be somewhere, would we really jump into a very expensive sailboat that goes maybe four miles per hour in a good wind and splashes us every five minutes? I mean really.

It’s called “aquarium keeping,” not “aquarium finishing” because we will never be finished. It is the ride, the act of keeping these colorful and expensive little creatures alive that is the thrill. And keeping them alive is only part of the fun. Changing water, cleaning glass, testing, dosing, re-aquascaping and writing about our experiences are all part of the fun, too. Even when something dies—yes, even when something dies—we can find fulfillment in figuring out what happened. If nothing ever died, we would call it stamp collecting. Now that’s a thrill.

Challenges are part of the fun
So when cyanobacteria, hair algae, flatworms, ich, or any number of other problems occur, be happy for the experience and don’t think of it as a disaster. A tornado is a disaster, an earthquake is a disaster, a supermodel gaining a pound is a disaster, but something happening in a fish tank is not a disaster. It’s just part of this wonderful hobby, a hobby that makes us happy.

I’ve enjoyed this fantastic hobby every day of my long life, and I will keep doing it until they put me in a nursing home. It has helped me through hard mental times and just boring times. Sometimes I spend days on end “working” on the tank, and sometimes weeks go by where I barely have time to feed the fish. I have had large die offs and constant spawning. But I’ve savored all those times and have never been disappointed. You can put whatever you want into this hobby, and I’ve loved every minute of it!

Photo credit: Paul Baldassano
 

Nobbygas

Well-Known Member
I agree with the 'fish muscle' bit. I always try to feed real live food at least once a week. I just feel that this gives the fish the opportunity to actually chase and catch their food, rather than just hoover it up. Plus, real live food just has to be better than any frozen/flake/pellets.
I also find that my fish follow me, in that as I walk past the tank, they all see me and if I stand still at one end, they all gather in front of me. If I move to the other end, they all come down to see me again. Like an old fool I started to walk up and down in front of the tank, just to give the fish some exercise. It was a bit like walking the dog. I got tired before they did though.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
Fish Are Superior to People!
JANUARY 12, 2015 BY PAUL BALDASSANO3 COMMENTS



When viewed at depth, a copperband butterflyfish looks much different than the colors we’re familiar with.

Why do I make this claim? Well, primarily to capture your attention. But think about some of the things fish can do that we cannot. For example, we two-legged beings can go forward, backward, and from side to side. Fish can do that too, but they can also go up and down, and they can do that just by thinking about it and barely moving a fin.


If we get up in the middle of the night because we hear a noise or are thinking about that Victoria’s Secret catalog on the table (strictly for research purposes, of course), we would run into walls, doors, windows, or, if we’re lucky, a beautiful cat burglar. (I would probably just trip over a cat!) But a fish would not run (or swim) into anything.

Have you ever gone fishing, sat there all day putting worms on a hook without getting a single bite, and then quit in disgust after throwing the rest of your worms in the water only to see 47 fish come up to devour all the worms you just dumped in? It happens all the time. They know there’s a hook in there. But how?

Put it all on the line
How are fish able to do all these things that are well beyond the capabilities of us “highly advanced” humans? Because fish have a lateral line that lets them know what is around them, even in pitch darkness. If a fish loses an eye, it barely notices and goes about life as if it just had LASIK surgery. It’ll get along fine just by relying on its lateral line. Everybody here who has a lateral line raise your hand. Higher! That’s what I thought.

Gender-bending ability
Many fish species can do something else that people can’t (without expensive surgery, anyway): They can change sex. Then, if they get bored, they can change back again.

I have some fire clownfish. Actually, I had one for a long time and then decided to get another one. That first one was either male or female; I have no idea. This fire clown sat there in a broken bottle for years and just looked out the glass at me. He (or she) kept guard over a nest and would keep it neat, blowing away detritus along with arrow crab poop. There wasn’t another fire clown within, perhaps, a 15-mile radius.

Then one day I added another fire clown and the two of them fought. I don’t know whether they both thought of themselves as boys, girls, or politicians. But then after a few years, they started becoming friends. Then they were more than friends if you know what I mean. So one of them became a female (I could tell by her eyelashes and the fact that she started to smell better).

Now I don’t know what possessed that one to change into a female, but I do remember walking in front of the tank in my underwear. I don’t know if that would have caused the transformation; my wife just tells me to get away from the front of the TV.

A kaleidoscope of colors
Another weird thing about fish is that the tropical ones are, for the most part, beautifully colored. Why is that? To attract mates? Scare predators? Look good in magazines? No, it’s because where fish live, the only color you can see is blue. If you descend in the ocean about 40 feet, or somewhere thereabouts (I’m a diver, but I never take a ruler with me), everything becomes blue because blue is the only color of the spectrum that gets through that much water. So all fish appear blue in the sea. A copperband butterfly would be blue with darker blue bands, and red appears black. The fish probably know why they have those colors, but no one else does.

Also, while we are seriously (or perhaps not so seriously) thinking about this, why do fish from temperate waters have drab colors? Ever see a bright red or blue flounder with yellow stripes? I didn’t think so, but why not? Why is it that people from tropical countries aren’t bright purple, yellow, and blue but tropical fish are? Despite having varying degrees of melanin in their skin, people from New York, Alaska, and Greenland are more or less the same colors as people from everywhere else. Why are fish so special?

So who’s really the superior animal?
Remember we spend thousands of dollars on fish, then spend more thousands on rocks, then spend hundreds on medications, test kits, books, etc. On top of that, we spend $12.00 for tiny little cubes of clam or mysis to feed them. What did a fish ever do for you? Nothing, right? Except die, jump out, or get ich, pop-eye, or swim bladder disease!

These are just some of the things I don’t know. There is a whole plethora of other things I don’t understand—an unimaginably vast expanse of knowledge I don’t possess. I mean we could go on about what is at the end of the universe and we would all have different opinions, sort of like ich threads. I think at the end of the universe is a brick wall with tar paper on top of it, and beyond that are strawberry fields forever. Prove me wrong. (Editor’s note: Pepperland, peopled entirely by Blue Meanies, actually lies beyond the universe…or is it across the universe?)

I guess we should save some room for your thoughts and then start on why invertebrates are smarter than we are.

Well, smarter than “some” of us anyway.
 
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