A Fish Fiasco

The Charlotte Observer carried a story today about how tropical fish farmers in Florida (yeah, wrap your brain around that one!) are facing a crop loss because of the terribly cold temperatures.  The area between Orlando and Tampa is apparently the only place in the US that you can farm tropical fish outdoors.  It amounts to about 50% of the tropical fish sold in the US each year.

In another interesting thing, they grow them in big tanks that happen to be the same as -- well -- as concrete casket vaults.

It's nice to see there's a duality of purpose there.

At our house, though, the fish news is better.  It’s a good day on 8th Avenue, because the fish are back.

For the first time since moving here in 1999, I had to put the heater in the fish pond last weekend. Something caused the waterfall to shift, meaning the pond was losing water faster than it should. Then with the 27 days of below freezing weather we’ve had, the pond froze over. Without time (or energy in the cold) to deal with the problem, my solution was to do what I should have done weeks ago – turn off the fountain and figure I’d deal with it in the springtime.

I hadn’t seen any fish in several weeks, though, and assumed that el Gato next door that keeps prowling our yard had eradicated them. I turned the fountain off because I couldn’t keep enough water in the pond to insure that the pump wouldn’t burn up.

Then I saw a fish in there, moving under the ice.

Here’s the thing about goldfish in a pond. Although they look “alive” from November to April, their brains are really turned off. They’re on auto-pilot and you don’t feed them – everything just flows through and makes a mess. They stay pretty good at hiding, though, but they do need just a little maintenance – mostly, not to get frozen into a block of ice.

Even that’s not necessarily a death penalty, though.  They're very resiliant.

Amazingly enough, this heater (designed for a cattle tank initially, and to just keep the water barely above freezing) thawed a hole in the pond ice and sank to the bottom fairly quickly. Within 24 hours, the entire pond was thawed out and liquid again. I reoriented the fountain to it’s winter configuration like I should have done about Thanksgiving, so that it recirculates water but doesn’t flow over the rocks, and gave the little guy some oxygen.

Fortunately, he didn't need mouth to mouth.  It's really hard to get rid of that taste afterwards.

Then something amazing happened. The water, steaming in the wicked cold spell we’ve been enduring, suddenly was populated with fish again. There’s at least 5 of them, all moving around with obvious and horrendous hangovers from the ice, but alive and mobile nonetheless.

They seem to be appreciating the heater, and they hover around not far from it, just in the shadows of where the waterfall would be if it were operating.

They still don’t have names, but my heart is gladdened that they’re alive.

It doesn’t take much to make some of us happy

I try not to show it, though – after all, they’re just goldfish.