Greetings, freezerinos! WIJF has been on hiatus this summer because my life has been freaking insane! ICVM conference with 3 talks (See earlier post), then grant deadlines, camping trip, packing and moving house, hiring new staff and inducting them into my team, breathing, and other activities (ranging from essential to trivial and/or infuriating) in addition to Actually Doing Some Science have been to blame. But WIJF is coming back like a bad rash! It cannot be defeated by bureaucracy, by my current lack of home internet connection, or even by the end of the universe! I have grand plans, muhahaha… This is just a teaser to give me some blog-writing momentum so I can finish some of those bigger posts sooner or later.
Stomach-Churning Rating: 3/10 — unless you are the goldfish in question, whose stomach has already been duly churned.
So I mentioned house-moving above, and we’ve finished that over the previous week. I had two ponds at my old home, full of >200 fish and (during breeding season; tweeted under #FrogCount) >200 frogs and toads, among other critters, documented on occasion in my Flickr photostream/set. Our new abode just has one pond, but a decent one at that, and we inherited some new fish that I am getting to know. Here is a peculiar goldfish, whose unusual anatomy inspired me to catch it, take a photo, and blog about it. Consider this:
I’ve done some Googling and confirmed my suspicions that this is not a pregnant goldfish but is some other condition that we could loosely term as pathological. It has been feeding reasonably well and seems not too perturbed– as much as a fish’s degree of perturbation can be read from its behaviour– by its rotund morphology. It has some problems controlling its inertia in rolling and pitching, which makes for some amusing viewing as well as easy capture.
But what’s up with this fish? It does not have dropsy, a nasty condition fish get that leaves the scales in a “pinecone” sort of extruded orientation. It may have a gut infection or other air sac problem. I’m certainly not a vet and don’t know and fishy vets. But I wanted to share the photo to stimulate discussion of fishy fish physiognomy. What’s your diagnosis, doctor internet?
Also, if this fish takes a turn for the worse, it very well may end up in my freezer and thence into an internal anatomy WIJF post (“What’s In John’s Goldfish?”). We shall see. But I’ve grown fond of this unnamed fish (soliciting suggestions for names below in the Comments), so I’ll see how long I can keep it out of that situation.
Hi John,
This is a condition derived from breeding. In goldfish farms they breed a lot of goldfish in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Originally this fish will probably come from a batch of long tailed goldfishes. Although this goldfish looks very healthy and large, chance is that in the near future its swim bladder will burst or get infected. At that moment the fish can’t swim upright anymore and best thing is to put it down. Pity
o, and to add to that: it is not it’s gut (necessarily) that is strange, but the length of its spine: that doesn’t grow with the same speed leaving little room for the guts so they bulk to the outside
Hi John,
This could equally be a spawn bound fish which happens to carp in the wild as well as the domesticated version and, of course, goldfish. If, for whatever reason, these fish do not spawn (usually due to weather conditions) then they can reabsorb the spawn throughout the winter – but not always. This can lead to an untimely, and not very nice, death of the fish during late winter / early spring and many fish do die like this every year, both in the wild and in domestic ponds.
Well, it’s bloated, sickly, possibly inbred, cumbersome, and gluttinous, so how about naming it “Congress”?
Well played, sir! I like this… it’s the leading candidate so far…
Or House of Lords for Local Flavour.
Or Human Resources?
Health & Safety Committee?
(runs)
Dropsy seems like a perfectly good name, even if it doesn’t actually suffer from edema.
Mieke seems to have covered it, and that may be combined with what Marke said, but I’d bet it was just the results of goldfish that were already bred with deformities to amuse the fish breeders mixing with each other in the “wild”. I’m constantly harping and writing about the ills in domestic dogs perpetuated by breeders whims. I breed natural, long-legged, long-jawed dogs, but so many breeders insist on breeding dogs that are nothing more than mutated monstrosities (someone recently told me their Pug/Boston terrier cross – a “Bug” as the gleefully referred to it – died giving birth to puppies sired by another pug. The puppies heads were too large to pass through the “birth canal”, and though rushed to the vets – obviously too late – for a caesarian, the mother and pups died. Gee, I wonder why.
This fish is probably the fish equivalent of that dog breeding, exacerbating conditions already exaggerated by humans. I have hundreds of goldfish in my pond, all descended from about 20 two inch fish I once saved from globe shaped bowls set as decorations on the tables at a wedding reception I attended. These fish have expressed some odd colors as they’ve bred amongst themselves (the original fish were just plain gold – “orange” actually), and I decided to liven things up in the pond (at least for me) even more by adding some Koi.
I put about a half dozen inexpensive 6 inch Koi in the pond, all of colors not seen in any of my goldfish so I could tell them apart, but did find one in the pet shop aquarium that really interested me. It was a common perch-shaped fish, but of a beautiful gold color; actually gold, not the orange of the goldfish. After I released the Koi in the pond they all disappeared. Though the goldfish would swim to me in the evening to be fed bread or chicken pellets, I didn’t see the Koi again for over a year, and thought they had died. Then one afternoon I noticed a pesky great blue heron hunting the pond. I don’t mind kingfisher and other predators taking excess fish, but the great blue herons always seem to go for my biggest, most attractive fish (I have some well over a foot long in the pond), and have decimated the huge bullfrogs I have collected off roads on rainy nights and released into the pond . So I usually set the dogs on them to drive them off, but on this particular day all the dogs were in the house, and I had my camera hanging around my neck. So I decided to try to get a photo of the heron hunting.
I stalked closer and closer to the ponds edge, using the cattails at the shallow end as cover, and finally got as close to the bird as I thought possible, and began focusing my shot. Just then the heron leaned forward in that way they have when they spot prey, so I prepared for an action shot. The heron thrust its head into the water, pulled back with a fish in its bill, and I got a shot of the bird just before it swallowed my golden Koi.
Nooooooo!!! I feel your pain. I had a bunch of koi in my old pond and they all died, but from my ineptitude keeping water levels/filtering at ideal levels rather than from herons — although we had a regular heron visitor it never seemed to have the courage to actually hunt in our pond, too freaked out I guess. Some of those koi took years of my careful attention before I slipped up and killed them off. 😦 I’ve now got cold feet (fins?) over buying new koi. Paradoxically, 3 ?golden? carp that I inherited from the former owners at my old home survived all this and grew to giant sizes, >18″ long, and now are the most treasured residents of my new pond.
Walter.
Relevant: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110216093002AAG9wgT
Looks like Stuart will win the prize for most appropriate surname!
As for the goldfish, given that you’re a Python fan, how about “Mr. Creosote”?
That’s the one for me! #Walter lol
I have a goldfish in my pond a the moment with this same condition.
😦