From: bhaskar@brtph181.bnr.ca (Shaji Bhaskar)
Subject: [All] Initial experiences with fish-keeping
Date: 11 Jul 93 20:41:19 GMT


I'd like to hear about fellow netters' initial experiences with
fish-keeping.  Here's my contribution.  I grew up on the south-western
coast of India, and my first tanks were as low-tech as you can get.

My first fish bowl was a gift from a friend of my mother's.  I'd say
it was about three gallons or so, but I was under ten, and twenty-five
years have passed since, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. I was blissfully
ignorant of all the "dos" and "don'ts" advocated by the experts, so I
broke just about every "rule" in the book with this tank.

I put in washed sand from our front yard as the substrate, filled the
tank with water, and added a few wild guppies that I caught from a
stream near my aunt's house.  Later, I added a few stems of Elodea
from a nearby pond.  I had never heard of filters, pumps and the like
so my tank was unfiltered.  I did not know that I was not supposed to
place the fish tank in direct sunlight, so I stuck it in my porch,
where the sun shone for most of the day in all its glory. Given the
local climate, there was no need for heating.  I did not know about
fish food, and would not have been able to get any even if I had
known, so my fish were fed a diet consisting entirely of scraps of of
boiled rice.

Once this tank was up and running, I was hooked.  I wanted more tanks.
But there were none to be had, so I improvised.  My mother liked
gardening, so she had lots of concrete pots of about five-gallon size.
I got a few from her, sealed up the holes in the bottom with concrete
that I mixed myself, and  in short order, I had four or five "tanks".

I also discovered an easy source of live fish - the local fish market.
In those days, I was the one who bought the fish.  The saltwater fish
were usually dead by the time they arrived at the market. But the
brackish and fresh water fish were, more often than not, live.  Ice
was not commonly available in those days, and the folks who sold the
fish would keep them alive in little pots of water, with only a few
kept in a basket as a "display".  A whole lot of active bargaining was
involved in buying the fish.  I was too young and inexperienced, so I
would simply wait till someone else struck what I considered a fair
deal, and ask that I be given the same price.  I would then pick
colorful fish that seemed to be in the best shape, dash home with
them.  If I was lucky, and the fish were not too expensive, my mother
would let me keep a couple in my "tanks".  The rest became lunch.

I did not have a whole lot of success keeping the brackish water fish,
because although I knew they needed salt, I had no idea how much.  The
freshwater fish would often survive for long periods of time.  I even
released a few into the well behind my house.  There was a healthy
colony of survivors till a few years ago, when technology finally
caught up.  My parents installed an electric pump in the tank, and
decided the fish had to go, since they did not want fish paste in
their water.

There was another source of fish, as well - the ponds and lagoons in
my father's village.  My father would visit his village (a couple of
hours from our town) every couple of months, and I often got to go
with him.  There were all sorts of colorful and not-so-colorful fish
to be found.  I did not use nets to catch them - I usually just used
my hands. Alternatively, I would just wait till a fish came really
close to the bank, and quickly splash water near the fish on to dry
land with my foot.  I was lucky, the fish would be left high and dry.

After three or four years (when I was in my early teens), I lost
interest in keeping fish, and dropped the hobby.  After I got married,
my wife told me she had always wanted to keep fish, so we started out
again.  But I have always remained partial to fish from my part of the
world. A few months ago, I received a few Green Panchax eggs from
Oleg.  I was really glad when I recognized these are some of the
denizens of the local ponds.  They are known in my native language as
"manathu-kanni", which translates to "the fish with an eye on top of
its head".  (Thanks, Oleg!  The second generation are adults now.)

Memory is now faint, so I cannot identify most of the fish that I
kept. Among the fish I caught and kept, I now recognize various
killies, barbs, danios, and a couple of species of cichlids. I also
recognize that there were local variations in the size and coloration
of several species depending on the locality from which they came.
It's too bad I did not have access to a good catalog of the local
fishes.

-Shaji.
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Signature?  ... er.. It's in the shop right now.
Shaji Bhaskar * BNR, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA * (bhaskar@bnr.ca)
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