Tank birthday and I'm a Geezer

[Paul B]

As I was sitting here enjoying a tuna fish sandwich with a side of shrimp cocktail, I was thinking about a thread I saw yesterday about how to euthanize a fish. Now I have been keeping fish since trillobites were the best clean-up crew, so I certainly don't want to see fish suffer, but I wonder how this tuna was euthanized or these shrimp.

Did they carefully put it in a small container, play soft music and dose it with clove oil? I really don't know. Those shrimp too. How did they meet their end?

Being of Italian descent, on Christmas, it is our custom to have at least 7 different kinds of seafood for dinner. Last Christmas we had over twenty. Does that make us bad? Of course, we never eat fish in view of my tank, as that would be like cannibalism, and my fish may get the horrors.

My family owned a seafood market, and on Fridays, my Dad would bring me down to the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan to buy the seafood for his store. It is amazing that those tons of fish that were unceremoniously dumped on the sidewalk were then moved around with snow shovels. Were they all euthanized? I wonder where they got the time.

And how much clove oil were they using?

In those days there were also huge sea turtles still alive on their backs. Now I know they were just pets as no one I know would hurt a beautiful sea turtle.

Every day I feed my fish live blackworms, clams and mysis. I am not sure if each one of those worms has feelings or thinks about it's family just before it gets eaten.

The millions of mysis also. Do they have more civil rights than the new born brine shrimp I feed my mandarins. Is there a brine shrimp rights group? How about the goldfish we sometimes feed to our moray eels? Do they have fewer rights than, say, a lionfish or tang? What if we fed tiny tangs to large goldfish? Would that be OK?

If we were to cycle a tank with a live fish or shrimp, we would get yelled at from everyone, but it seems to be perfectly fine to cycle a tank with a fish or shrimp that suffocated on the deck of a ship. I wonder about that. I also wonder about the leather belt I am wearing. How did they remove that strip of skin from that cow without him noticing?

Many people dip corals in insecticide before they put them in their tanks to kill "pests". I am sure those "pests" think of us as pests and, worse, murderers. If those "pests" were larger and cuter, we would keep them as pets and try to kill the corals they were living on.

Just one of the things I think about.

 

[Paul B]

My morning walk was un-eventful, dull and raining so I didn't take a picture.

If you want to see what it looked like, just look at this picture from last year, but before you do, smear "Vaseline" on your screen and spray sea water from your reef on it.

Thats what it looked like today.

 

[Paul B]

In 2011 I see I posted this then:

I am in my 60s now so I also don't know how long I will have, but I hope to get the tank to 50

Now I think my tank is 55 years old. (it could be 54, I am not that good at math )

Now I will say that I will call it a big success if it lasts another 45 years when it will be 100 years old.

Of course, many people will still say I am lucky because I don't quarantine. But I doubt I will hear them

 

[Paul B]

This urchin was as big as a ping Pong Ball when I got it a couple of years ago. My last one croaked after about 10 years.

Now this one is almost 11" wide.....Or tall,,,,, depending on how you are looking at it.

 

[Paul B]

I just sold my Lionel Trains. They were 77 years old. My parents got them for me when I was born. The entire set in 1948 sold for about $100.00, and I just got $100.00 for them. A great deal, if I must say so myself.

 

[MadReefer]

I have an American Flyer training set. Went out of business long long long ago. I was told not worth anything.

 

[DaveK]

I just sold my Lionel Trains. They were 77 years old. My parents got them for me when I was born. The entire set in 1948 sold for about $100.00, and I just got $100.00 for them. A great deal, if I must say so myself.

I also had Lionel trains as a kid. When I was a teen my mom gave them away. I don't think there was anything very valuable in there, but I sure didn't like my mom pulling that on me.

 

[DaveK]

I have American Flyer training set. Went out if business long long long ago. I was told not worth anything.

Actually American Flyer trains are still available. Oddly enough, through a series of sales of the brand they are now produced by Lionel, of all companies. So you can still get some locos, cars, and track. I don't think they still make the AF operating accessories. If you want to check it out, here is a link to the company and AF - https://www.lionel.com/brands/american-flyer

 

[Paul B]

My Lionel trains were all iron and weighed a ton. I still had the original book that showed all the trains and I also have some of the boxes they came in

 

[Paul B]

Thank God, we rescued that second downed pilot in Iran. What a fantastic Easter present for him and his family. I am so happy.

 

[Paul B]

So this morning like every morning I walk down to the beach about a half mile away. I have to go down this big hill and at the bottom, just before the stairs there is this house and the guy has this big, vicious dog.



He sometimes lets it run loose and poop all over the place including the stairs to the beach and stairs up to summer cottages where I walk after the beach.

This time of the year, I can't really get on the sand on the beach because the bottom stairs are not there as they remove them, so the storms of the winter don't destroy them. Because of this, when I go down the stairs, about 60 of them I have to turn around to come back up.

As I start coming up, I hear this big dog. I don't really like this dog because I know his only thought in this world is to tear off my leg.

I think it's a mutt. Anyway I am not afraid of much but this dog scares me and he is not really allowed to be walking around off a leash on a public road and pooping all over the place.

When I drive there, he jumps around my car and tries to rip off one of the tires, and those off-road tires are expensive.

I have no place to go and have to go past this vicious creature, but I know he is there so I have a can of "dog spray" with me.

This stuff is a dog training aid and doesn't hurt the dog, it just makes a loud noise that is supposed to sound like geese. I don't know if dogs are afraid of geese, but I would rather it sounded like a lion, Nancy Pelosi, or the Loch Ness Monster.

The dog starts barking and snarling at me, so I take out the spray. You are supposed to spray it up in the air and not at the dog. Maybe it sounds more geese like if you do that.

Just before I pulled the trigger, I hear the guy calling the dog.

"HEY GODZILLA" come over here. "GODZILLA, HERE BOY".
The mongril looks at his owner, then at me, then back to his owned, then back to me.

He isn't sure to remove my leg or go home. Eventually he turns and goes to his owner and I continued home with all my parts.

I think I am going to also buy pepper spray. This way, if the dog looks like he is going to bite me, I will spray the pepper into "MY" eyes so I don't see him taking my leg off.

 

[Paul B]

 

[Paul B]

Beautiful 60 degree beach walk this morning.

 

[Ezve]

The contrast of the last two pictures are so cool

 

[Paul B]

It seems I posted this in 2013. I have an appointment to go to and have nothing to do for an hour.

Posted January 17, 2013

Some thoughts on fish health



Keeping fish healthy is a very simple thing, fish want to get and stay healthy even though they are rarely in that condidion when you get them. Of course we know why that is with the stress of collection, shipping and then being placed in a tiny, bare tank with other, un familiar creatures in artificial sea water with artificial lighting that abruptly comes on and goes off then being fed an assortment of un familiar foods that don't wriggle or try to get away. It's a miracle anything lives. Unfortunately, many don't. But, luckily for us, it is easy to get and keep fish in "almost" the same condition they were in in the sea. How do we know if our fish are in great condition?

That is also easy. If they die, that is a no brainer, if they get sick, any type of sickness, that is also un acceptable as fish in the sea rarely get sick. There is a reason for that and that reason is food. Yes water chemistry is a factor but it is more of a factor for corals than fish. Fish don't really care if their salinity is a few points higher or lower than what the "experts" tell us it should be. They don't notice if the nitrates are zero or 40. They may like it better at zero but my 19 year old fish have never complained. They also did not complain when I was away and the "babysitter" let the water level go down by 7" making the salinity off the scale. The fish also didn't text me when the temperature went into the 90s or from the Hurricane Sandy, into the 60s.

No, I don't advocate letting these things happen, I also don't want hair growing out of my ears or gaining a few pounds, I don't like when my taxes go up or when I get a flat tire, but you know what? These things happen so get over it.

"But" if the fish are in great shape, they will forgive us and we can try to remedy the situation and try to change things so it doesn't happen again.

Getting fish in great shape should be a goal of everyone in this hobby that keeps a tank for enjoyment. Tanks in malls, stores or Paris Hiltons house are there for entertainment of people who like to see the brilliant colors but usually don't know a healthy fish from a plate of halibut steaks.

(I had that for dinner last night and it popped in my head)

Fish are simpler than us, (well, most of us) they don't worry about what to wear, or what other fish think about them because fish only think about three things. Eating, being eaten and spawning. (I myself also only think about 2 of those things, I won't say which two)

Being eaten is easy to prevent in a fish tank, don't add something that will eat them. So no Great white Sharks, or polar bears. Spawning is something that fish "always" do, not just some times, not just on holidays or birthdays, but always.

That is why there are so many fish. Are they spawning in your tank? Why not? Well, usually it is because they have no mate but even if there is no mate, many fish, especially bottom dwellers or fish in the damsel family don't seem to realize that there is no mate in there for them and if they are a male, they should be looking for a mate and cleaning a nest site.

Fish in spawning condition also do not get sick. "Almost" never, they also "almost" always live a very long time. Many of the fish we commonly keep should live 15, 20 or more years. There are no fish with a lifespan that is only a couple of years. Seahorses and pipefish have the shortest lifespan but even them should live 4 or 5 years.

Clownfish will live over 30 years as many people keep them that long and if one can live to that age, they all can.

Why don't they? Because they are not in breeding condition. That is the main reason.

Keeping the fish in clean water, feeding them a variety of food and watching what they like on TV will not get them in breeding condition. Sometimes it will but to get fish in that condition and keep them there all comes down to food.

Yes they will live on flakes, pellets, shrimp tails and a few other things but most fish were not designed to eat that type of diet. If you want to keep your fish in breeding condition, disease free and have them live forever you need to do a little extra work. First there is that TV thing, but then you have to know what "your" fish are supposed to eat. Not my fish, not Miss Hiltons fish, but your fish. Most fish in the sea do not live on flakes so you can do without them. I feed flakes to my worms.

There is nothing wrong with flakes for keeping fish alive but flakes are dried and usually heated.

If you think that is a good diet, eat them for a month and see if anyone wants to spawn with you.

Fish in the sea eat other fish, other whole fish. They do not eat shrimp and spit out the head and guts, they do not eat a fish and spit out the guts and bones. Guess why?

Bones are made of calcium and fish need calcium just as we do. I eat fish almost every day but I don't eat the bones and guts, but I am not a fish. Fish need "mostly" the guts and bones along with the eyes, tails, scales, eyelashes etc. They are also getting the benefit of what was that fishes last meal.

As I said fish don't worry about the things we worry about because we are not fish.

When a fish eats another fish it is getting (I am making up this number) 40% of it's meal as calcium, 20% fish oil and the rest is an assortment of minerals that the prey fish is made out of which happen to be "exactly" what the fish in our tank are made out of. What a concept, a food that is composed of exactly what our fish are made out of.

Shrimp tails, squid tentacles, fish fillets and Alpo dog food are just made out of muscle tissue, lacking most of what fish need.

So if we can feed fish exactly what they are made from, they have no choice but to be in the best condition they can be.

Of course if we keep them in saw dust instead of sea water, it will not matter what we feed them and they "may" not spawn.

Feeding whole fish is very hard because they are not available commercially. I have spoken to fish food distributers about this but they don't seem to care. The closest we have is frozen mysis. Mysis are a complete food but they have a problem. a large part of them is un digestable shell and that shell is not calcium so much of that food is wasted.



Putting whole fish in a blender is just disguesting and mush of the oils are lost. (Saturday Night Live used to do a Skit with the "Fish O Matic" where they did this.

A great food is clams because we are feeding the entire animal, guts and all. A better food is live blackworms. If you feed your fish live worms a couple of times a day, and you don't keep your fish in saw dust, I can almost guarantee they will get in spawning condition (all other factors correct) Live worms are a whole food with blood, guts and all.

(I think that was a John Wayne movie) Fish eggs are another really good food as they also contain everything a fish is made out of but they also contain chemicals that will make your skimmer go nuts so they have to be rinsed very well.

For small fish like mandarins and pipefish, new born brine shrimp are excellent because most of them when they are just born are mostly oil from their yock sack. After a few hours they lose much of their nutrition so you have to hatch them yourself. I do and also fed live worms every day. My mandarins spawn every few weeks as do my 19 year old fireclowns blue striped pipefish. I don't have to quarantine and have no use for a hospital tank, but if you don't have my tank, you may want to keep your quaranting procedures and hospital tank.

In the unlikely event that you disagree with this post, start your own thread called, "PaulB doesn't know a clam from Paris Hilton's dog and he should stick to breeding guppies in his bathtub"

 

[Paul B]

This is another useless old post that has nothing to do with fish. We are waiting for some people, and I am at a slow point in a "thing" I am building, so I will add this for you youngsters who didn't grow up in the 50s. So if you are looking for fishy stuff, go and look at your iPhone 16

Growing up in the fifties.

I decided to write this because this morning we FaceTimed our granddaughter, who has just about anything you can imagine and is bored out of her head.

Because of Covid they had to leave their apartment in the West Village in Manhattan and go to their other home on a mountain in Vermont, where they have a small pool, pool table, ping pong table, Pin Ball machine, trampoline, ATVs, (along with hundreds of acres of woods with trails) snowmobiles, A swimming pond, rope swing etc.

Anyway:

I never thought we were poor. I grew up in Queens, New York, but I was born in Brooklyn near Coney Island.

In those days we didn't get allowances, had no computers, cell phones, tablets or just about anything else. We also played outside no matter what the weather was like because "if" you had a TV, it was tiny and of course black and white. There was one or two shows on, like The Ed Sullivan show, which was a variety show where they would get "talented" people that would sing, dance, or balance dishes on their noses.

There was sort of "Color" TV but that was a curved piece of glass that you would hang in front of the black and white TV. It was tinted blue near the top and green near the bottom, so if you were watching a scene that was in a grassy field, it looked really cool, but any other scene just looked ridiculous. We didn't have one of those, but if you did, I would imagine you would keep watching "The Sound of Music," which had a lot of singing out in the grass.

I do remember seeing Elvis Presley on there in his first public appearance. That was the extent of our indoor entertainment and remember, there was no air conditioning.


My "Fish Tank" was the bottom of a wine barrel or an enameled basin which I kept turtles, tadpoles, minnows, and newts that I would catch in streams.

There were no fish stores but there were toy stores and fish would be sold there and called "Toy Fish". They had guppies, molly’s, swordtails and little else. Occasionally they would have a crawfish. Eventually dry food was sold by Wardley and were dried flies and ants. .

One day I heard my Mother scream, I ran there and saw here standing there holding a broom. My crawfish got out and was walking across the kitchen floor. She thought it was a mouse and squashed it.

My Dad had a fish small fish market in Jackson Heights and my Mom didn't drive. She would wait with me for the bus and then tell the bus driver to let me off in front of my Dad's fish market, which was about a 45-minute bus ride. I would go by myself and sit behind the driver when I was probably 5 or 6 years old and the driver would stop the bus in front of the store (which was not even on a bus stop) and watch me go in. (Today, they would put your Mother in jail) Remember cell phones were decades away.

The fish and meat stores in those days had a thick layer of sawdust on the floor and at night they would sweep it up and put on new sawdust. It would collect the fish scales and guts.

(Today, because of lawyers, you can't do that)

I would pile up the sawdust and make a fort. Then I would take live blue claw crabs and live lobsters and put them down and try to make them fight. Lobsters can't really walk out of water but crabs run fast. I had a toy metal cannon and I would shoot tooth picks at the poor crabs.

(there was no plastic and toys were metal)

I would also lay some dead sardines in there for effect.

I had other toys in the fish store like rubber bands and I would shoot flies. I would feed the flies to my newts and turtles. Sometimes my Dad would give me a piece of wood, a hammer and nails and I would spend hours banging in the nails and pulling them out.

Occasionally, I would ask my dad for a nickel. He would always give it to me, but I had to work for it, like maybe shine his shoes, which entailed about 30 minutes of removing large fish scales, then shining them. After he inspected them, I would take that nickel to the toy store on the corner next to the firehouse and buy some gum or caps that I used to "shoot off' with a rock.

I walked to school, which was only about 5 blocks away, and when my shoes would get holes in them, I would get linoleum (which was flooring) from abandoned buildings and houses and put pieces of that in my shoes. When it wore out, I would get another piece.

(My Daughter doesn't believe we did that, but it was common practice)

Someone gave me a baby chicken, and in a few weeks, it grew to full size. Once, the thing followed me to school and the Principal had to call my Mother to come and pick it up.

Another thing I remember about grammar school. The teacher called my Mother to school and told her I couldn't read and they were going to leave me back. I was a prolific reader and my Mother knew it so she took me and the Encyclopedia (big history text book like Google but you couldn't update it) to school.

The teacher and Principal were there and my Mother told me to open the book to any page and read it. I opened the book and started to read about President Eisenhower (who was the President at the time)

The teacher asked me why I wouldn't read in school. I said those kids books were silly.

After that, they made me a reading tutor for kids who couldn't read.

Linoleum was a great find because we also used it in our "Zip" guns, which were pieces of wood with a nail on one end and a clothespin on the other end. You stretched a rubber band from the nail to the clothespin and put a piece of linoleum in the rubber band. When you pushed on the clothes pin to open it, the linoleum would fly maybe 50'.

We had a large group of friends and once we dug an underground fort in an empty lot. It was probably 5' deep and topped with logs, then trees grew on it.

It filled with rain water and we forgot about it for many years. We remembered it when they were building a Supermarket there and a bulldozer backed over it and fell in. They had to get a crane to get it out.

We always had money because we were street smart. Main Street was about two or three miles away, and we would take bubble gum, a string, and a fishing sinker. You lower the weight through the subway grates down about 12' to pick up coins.

Those grates were to supply air to the trains below and they were usually on bus stops. The bus fare was 15 cents so people used to drop money there.

You could make a couple of bucks in an hour and the movies were only 75cents.

After we would collect all the change we would pick up empty bottles at horseshoe courts and take them back to the stores for the two cents