Editorial 3.1, January 2001, by Deirdre Helfferich Midwinter Fish Frenzy I’ve discovered a wonderful way to innoculate myself from the annual spring madness that descends each February 1, or at least, I hope I have: the first seed catalogs have arrived, but amazingly, I haven’t yet succumbed to planting delirium. The secret? I purchased a 55-gallon aquarium for Christmas. Buying a large fishtank is NOT a cheap alternative to a gardening fixation. The first purchase was the aquarium, but then I had to get filters, a heater, lights, a pump, airline tubing, a stand (built by the long-suffering spouse), gravel, rocks (dug out of the snow by the noble spouse), a cover (yet to be built by the aforementioned spouse to whom I now owe more brownie points than I can count), books, plants, and fish. Snails are cheap. Algae is even cheaper. Water costs six cents a gallon. The rest costs an arm and a leg. This interest in keeping small, colorful water-dwellers started back in my youth, with the warping of my young mind by my mother, who kept tropical fish in a 15-gallon tank. I spent hours with my nose pressed up against the glass (I am extremely nearsighted) watching the fish swim about. As I grew older and lived on my own, I set up my own tank, but until I got my house here in Ester, it wasn’t very practical and after a few attempts I gave it up, because I kept moving around. In the last year, my interest in aquarium-keeping was renewed thanks to a coworker, who is herself a fervent tropical fish hobbyist with multiple tanks in her house. I dug out my old 20-gallon hexagonal tank, then I bought a new rectangular 20-gallon, then borrowed my mother’s old 15-gallon, and am currently sitting a 10-gallon tank for a neighbor who is out of the state for the winter. After a few discussions with my husband about the possibility of designing and building a REALLY big aquarium (oh, say, 6 or 8 feet long by 2 feet by 2 feet), we decided that that much weight might get us a big hole in the floor. So we elected to purchase one of a more reasonable size. Now I have a large glass box four feet long filled with slightly cloudy water, a few greenish rocks, and a lot of gravel. Next week my expensive underwater shrubbery will arrive, and I will start planting. The tank will require a settling-down period before I can introduce any fish (and then only a few at a time) so that bacteria can get started and the plants can accustom themselves to the new accomodations. It’s hard to wait, but it’s better for the fish if I do. In the meantime, I will obsessively make lists of the different kinds of fish I would like to purchase. Actually, I’ve already done this part. Several times. Fish are fascinating animals, and some of the commonly-kept species, such as platys, swordtails, mollies, angelfish, guppies, goldfish, and koi, have been bred into an amazing variety of shapes and colors. Then there is the incredibly rich diversity of species available. I try to keep only those which are commercially bred, rather than wild-caught, because many varieties are becoming scarce in their natural habitats--often because their natural habitats are disappearing too, particularly in the tropics. My fish wish list includes egg-layers such as tiger barbs (nippy striped diamond-shaped fish), zebra danios, blue danios, leopard danios, Kerr’s danios (danios are zippy little schoolers that love streams), corydoras (cute tiny social catfish built like little armored tanks with fins and whiskers), kuhli loaches (striped miniature eels), otocincluses (algae-eaters with sucker mouths), white cloud mountain minnows (a beautiful Chinese fish with a blue-gold stripe, red and yellow fins, and a body that looks grey, green, red, or gold depending on the angle of the light), gouramis (horizontally challenged but two-dimensionally gifted), and lots and lots of tetras. Livebearers I would like to see in my new tank are platys (rather stupid-looking but they come in bright colors), guppies (they look smarter but aren’t), and maybe a Montezuma swordtail or two. Naturally, I don’t have room even with the new tank to house all these different species, so perhaps I’ll need to get another big aquarium. Or maybe I’ll just buy packages of vegetable seeds and think about gardening tools instead. | ||
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