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I've been doing some more reflecting, and what I'm about to say might prove a tad controversial, but hopefully, my readers will find my ideas meet with a degree of approval.

Quite a few of the problems encountered (particularly by newcomers to fishkeeping, but it can catch the more experienced off guard at times too) can be laid at the door of what I shall call the 'instant gratification' culture. This is embodied by television and other forms of home entertainment: you buy the TV/VCR/DVD player, take it home, plug it in and enjoy. End of story. For quite a few people, it's the same with cars. You buy the car, drive it home, and when you want to go somewhere, get in, start it up, and off you go. Maintenance, particularly for affluent owners, is usually someone else's problem. If it starts to become troublesome and needs a lot of maintenance, you ditch it and get a new one.

The culture of instant gratification, however, does NOT apply to fishes. Fishes are NOT things you simply take home, plug in and watch, engaging in channel hopping to find the ones you want the most. An aquarium is NOT a TV. It may look like one, and I even know of people who have constructed aquaria inside TV cabinets, but there the resemblance ends.

An aquarium is a complex biological system. Moreover, it is one that is largely isolated from the rest of the environment. Unlike natural water systems, which [1] have far larger volumes of water, and [2] are connected to other biological systems (e.g., when fish eating birds arrive for a meal), an aquarium is a body of water, kept separate from the vast majority of outside biological systems, in which living organisms are expected to coexist. And, the good news is that they can, and can do so spectacularly well, provided that the person responsible for the aquarium is prepared to exert some effort directed toward that end. To be successful, an aquarist needs to engage in both physical effort (various housekeeping tasks such as water changes and gravel vacs) and intellectual effort (understanding the proper functioning of entities such as biological filter substrates, and acquiring a certain ecological awareness, noting such details as species compatibility).

The trouble is, the seductive pleasures of instant gratification, as embodied in televisions and cars, lull all too many people into thinking that all they have to do is buy, plug in and go. An aquarium doesn't work like that. It's a living system, and living systems require tending. They require patience. They require application and diligence on the part of the human being responsible for them, in the case of captive living systems such as aquaria. And, of course, along with the 'plug in and go' mentality, there is the dread hand of fashion, typified recently by the infamous Nemo film, which if studied diligently, actually contains much the same message that I am promulgating here. Sadly, all too many cinema goers see it simply as yet another 'sit and watch' piece of light entertainment, without bothering to actually think about what they are watching. And, when little Johnny starts clamouring "Daddy, can I have a Nemo?" how many parents will take the trouble to sit down with little Johnny and explain that Nemo is a cartoon fish, and real fish need looking after?

One of the messages that I push here on this board (and this is yet another instance of this) is that an aquarium is an entity that requires attributes that are unpopular or unfashionable in today's "I want it now" world. Attributes I've already cited above, such as patience, application, and a willingness to learn. All too often, any pastime that requires intellectual input is dismissed these days as 'boring' or 'nerdy', but if it wasn't for those of us willing to be unfashionable, boring and nerdy, the shiny toys that the instant gratification brigade love so much wouldn't have come into existence. If you took the average couch potato and exposed him to even a fraction of the underlying engineering complexity behind television broadcasting, he'd have a seizure. And how many people watching trashy DVDs on their shiny new DVD player have even the slightest inkling how a DVD player works?

Sadly, I've encountered the same mentality among managers in IT companies, believe it or not. People who think that all that's needed to get their shiny product into the marketplace is a nice pretty user interface with lots of shiny buttons for the users to press, and hey presto, they get their work done like magic. It doesn't work like that, and as a former assembly language programmer responsible for real-time embedded systems (including operating systems for cruise missiles) I'm well placed to blow this myth into orbit with a 50-megaton thermonuclear warhead. Recently I've been working on a project to map images onto curved surfaces (known as Bzier surfaces to those with the requisite mathematical background) and I've now brought this project, in between writing articles for this Board, maintaining an underwater madhouse full of frolicking Panda Corys, and applying for jobs with various organisations whose IT departments are managed by MBAs who wear red braces and think that they're Superman, to something approaching fruition. If I show the average randomly selected couch potato (or for that matter quite a few so-called IT managers) the underlying code, just watch those eyes glaze over. The same malaise infects politics too, a case of 'never mind the substance, concentrate on the pretty packaging', but I'll leave detailed analysis of that aside in deference to the operating conditions in this forum.

But if it hadn't been for the willingness of those who went before us to devote effort and intellectual rigor to their pursuits, our lives now wouldn't be so easy. I for one still find it amazing that technology and understanding has advanced to the point where reef systems are now manageable, and successfully so, by the reasonably educated layman. Twenty years ago, they were the subject of Ph.D research papers. No doubt in another twenty years, someone willing to be 'boring' and 'nerdy' will crack the secret of keeping Rainbow Butterfly Fishes alive for more than two weeks in the typical home marine aquarium. Likewise, if John Logie Baird hadn't wrestled with engineering problems of considerable complexity, and solved them, we wouldn't be able to push a button on the channel zapper and surf zillions of TV channels from the armchair.

But the fact remains that a certain degree of intellectual rigor, and all those other unfashionable character traits so often derided as 'uncool' are the very ones that make for successful fishkeeping. You don't need a Ph.D in marine biology to keep a reef system, but it sure helps an awful lot if you take the time to learn from those who have and who made it possible in the first place. And those of us here who have been successful with our fishkeeping didn't become successful by channel zapping. Take Shini, for example: he's a practising veterinarian, and you don't get to be one of those overnight. Here in the UK it's a five year degree course, and a hard one at that, in which you can be in a lecture theatre in the morning learning about metabolic pathways, and up to your eyeballs in filth on a farm with your arm up a cow's passages in the afternoon. Chances are it's not that different in America. But all that effort means that when Shini has the chance to keep a Potamotrygon motoro freshwater stingray in an aquarium, first, he'll set about doing it properly, and second, it'll live a pretty decent life being cared for by someone knowledgeable. Likewise, most of the marine keepers like Oleta didn't end up with resplendent miniature reefs in their homes without working toward that end. And my Pandas wouldn't spawn once per week if they weren't happy with the little underwater Disneyland of bogwood caves and plants that I spend so much time caring for - and as if to reinforce the point, here am I, 40 minutes after another water change and gravel vac, and my Pandas look as if they're gearing up for yet another five hour spawning marathon.

There's a popular car sticker over here in the UK. It reads: "A dog is for life, not just for Christmas". The same applies to fishkeeping. While I've only had the Pandas for around 18 months, the Panda Palace itself has been running since December 1994, and in that time, I've averaged around two dead fish per year, almost all of them from sheer old age. I recently posted about my Methuselah Otocinclus, which went to the great aquarium in the sky aged over 9 years old. Yes, it's possible, but [1] you have to love your fish, and [2] you have to do the spadework and the headwork to make it happen. It won't happen if you treat an aquarium as yet another TV-style shiny toy or disposable income status symbol.

I really should get an editorial job on a magazine. Any publishers reading this, my fees are reasonable



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

CHEER!!! I really appreciated your article. My husband and I are striving to teach our daughter (at 18 months) that everything is not replacable... unlike people I've known over the years who rush out and buy a new toy when one is broken. We are teaching her, instead, that you have to work hard and care for anything in your possession. Recently, I commented to a friend who was cleaning out her Betta's bowl that she should be more careful because he could easily jump out of his cup while she was cleaning, etc... she looked at me and said "but he only cost $3, I can always get another". I was amazed. But so many people feel that way about fish... that it's only a fish and you can easily replace it... and they do because they never put in the effort to take care of them properly or even learn how to. Fortunately, my husband and I always spend a lot of time reading and searching the net whenever we want to start something new. Anyhow, thanks for a well-written article and I agree with you completely.

-Beth

Glad to be of service Beth! But then I was brought up in an age before planned obscolescence and the "I want it now" culture had took hold. We're a dying breed, look after us while we're around

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002