The Shorts-in-January Fish
This is a touch off topic, but the oceans are a pet cause of mine, and I’m always pleasantly surprised by the New York Times’ reporting on fish issues. Yesterday they published a story about tropical fish being gathered off the Long Island coast, a phenomenon I’d never heard of before.
Anybody who went to college in a cold climate knows the shorts-in-January type. He’s the guy that insists on wearing sandals and board shorts in the dead of winter because the 20-below wind chill “doesn’t bother him.” It’s typically a freshman, as by his second year, shorts-in-January guy will substitute warm sanity for the misguided rebellion of frostbitten calves.
As the Times reports, there are shorts-in-January fish, as well, although they’re not such willing participants in the deal. The Atlantic Gulf Stream carries some newborn tropicals—e.g., butterflyfish and angelfish—from their home off the Florida coast to northeastern shores. While their hippie college counterpart only has to endure the chill and the laughs of his peers, shorts-in-January fish suffer a somewhat crueler fate when winter comes: They die.
Except for a lucky few who are “rescued” for exhibit at places like the New England Aquarium. (A nice spot, by the way, if you hit it at an off-peak time when there aren’t field-trip hellians running around and screaming “WHERE’S NEMO? NEMO! NEMO? NEMO!!!”1) More aquariums in the area are realizing that this is a cheap way to catch tropical fish (no need to ship them up from the South) and it has less of an ecological impact, to boot.
This encouraging paragraph appears near the end of the piece:
[New England Aquarium senior aquarist Brian] Nelson, a self-described “coral reef geek,” is experimenting with medicines to treat fish infections to improve their odds for survival. In an aquarium, Gulf Stream fish could live for up to 20 years, depending on the species and how well they adjust to the tank.
The current state of aquarium medicine is an embarrassing mishmash of tinctures and tonics; we’re still relying on the equivalent of castor oil when it comes to curing sick fish. Very few veterinarians are trained in fish medicine, so amateur aquarists are forced to rely on message-board wisdom and commonly resort to dumping antibiotics into infected tanks, which is a bad idea in any number of ways. Godspeed, “coral reef geek” Brian Nelson.
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