By Wlad Franco-Valias
Tag : Example of Anecdote text
Do your fish ever do something that
amuses
you? If so, how about sharing your stories with the rest of the
membership? Here are a few
from my experiences, and yes, they are true.
In my young
teenage days in Brazil I built a pond. My mother bought me
some angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) for the pond, and one
of them was the biggest
angelfish I had ever seen. Being in a tropical country meant bugs
were plentiful and all
flies that were swatted inside the house were thrown in the pond for
the fish. We also had
a nest of paper wasps behind the house. One day I discovered I could
pick up these wasps
as they drank from the pond and crush the thorax before they could
sting my fingers. So
when I was bored I would sit by the pond and wait for the wasps to
come for a drink. I
would pick them up, crush them, break them in two to feed to the
fish. One day I
wasn’t so quick and one wasp started to sting me. I tossed it into
the pond quickly
and the large angelfish came up to eat it. I should also mention
that we had two comet
goldfish (Carassius auratus) whose hobby was to take food
from the angel. Well, one
of them took the angry wasp just as the angel was about to eat it.
The goldfish stopped
near the surface, then splashed violently and raced along the length
of the pond rubbing
its mouth on the bottom. It had been stung! The goldfish lived and
continued to steal food
from the angel.
Another time
a friend of mine came across some fishermen at the river
and he brought me a gift for the pond: four armored catfish (Callichthys
callichthys).
They liked the pond but were not happy when I cleaned it once and
placed them in a shallow
metal pan we used for carrying wet laundry. They panicked when I
came by with more fish,
slid up the smooth edge of the pan and landed on the floor of the
veranda. Then they
proceeded to race across the floor and into the grass of the front
yard. My friend and I
spent frantic minutes chasing catfish on dry land.
On my last
year of university studies I owned a beautiful blue male Betta.
He was such a hit with my roommates that we named him Max Headroom.
He was no ordinary Betta
for besides getting carnations from a secret admirer at Valentine’s
Day he would come
out of the water to take freeze dried tubifex worms from my
finger. I would break a
piece from a tubifex cube, wet it in the tank water and stick
it on the tip of my
finger. That was Max’s cue to come up and get a treat. I would raise
my finger slowly
and he would come up to half a body length out of the water and take
the tubifex
from my finger. One day I decided to try the same trick with frozen
brine shrimp. Well,
the shrimp were not as bulky as the tubifex so Max bit the
corner of my finger.
Unwilling to admit his mistake he hung on to me. I must have been
quite a sight trying to
shake a Betta off my finger. I recall feeling many small
sharp teeth trying to get
a chunk of my finger. Though he couldn’t cut though the thick skin
he did leave a red
circular bite mark. That was the end of our fancy feeding for he
decided that it was much
easier to eat food that is not attached to fingers. I don’t blame
him.
One time I
learned how fish sitters must feel when looking after
someone’s fish. I agreed to look after a fellow club member’s fish
while he was
on holidays. After a familiarization visit when I learned how much
of what to feed, it all
looked easy. One tank had young Texas cichlids (Herichthys
cyanoguttatum) and some
grown Rift Lake cichlids separated by a partition. I was warned of
the inevitable mayhem
that the partition prevented. On a Friday some fish knocked the
partition down and I found
the fish displaying their full territorial behavior. Nobody seemed
hurt and everyone was
accounted for. What a relief! Saturday morning I found one of the
rift lake cichlids
hanging vertically in the water, staring at the ceiling, barely
breathing. Oh no, and I
was on my way out for the weekend. What to do? Euthanize the fish or
leave it in the hopes
of a recovery? There was no spare tank and time dictated the latter
option, even if it
meant a stinky cleanup job later. Sunday night I returned expecting
the worst and I found
the fish alive and well, doing its share of terrorizing a Texas
cichlid that managed to
squeeze by the partition. Turned out I had only seen the fish early
in the evenings; the
fish was asleep that Saturday morning! The morals of the story: get
to know the
fish’s quirks beforehand, have spare tanks ready for emergencies,
and don’t
trust cichlids.?