April 26, 2007--Gone Fishin'

In my old neighborhood I was famous for my fish tank. I created such a realistic environment with coral and rocks and live plants that some of my friends even called it an aquarium. It had a heater, a pump to add oxygen to the water, and a couple of catfish whose job it was to scour the gravel, eating the fish poop, as a natural way to keep the tank and water clean. But since it was set in our dining room close to the window, the sun that streamed in created an algae problem. Thus, every other day I used a scraper to remove it from inside the glass and then siphoned it out.

But the glass was never clean enough to satisfy my mother, who valued clean almost as much as rectitude. Actually, she saw a connection between the two. So one day, when I was off in school, she gave my fish tank a proper cleaning. I think she used Babo-O and fine steel wool to get off every last bit of the clinging algae. It worked—the tank and water gleamed.

The only problem was that the next day, when I went to give the fish their morning feeding, I found all of them were floating belly-up in the tank. My Guppies, my Betas, my Neons, my Angel Fish.

So I was not surprised to learn that the world’s largest aquarium, the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, has a version of the same problem. Fish are dying there also because of what the staff needs to do to keep things spic and span and to try to keep the fish alive in the simulated “natural” environment. This includes force feeding through tubes pretty much all the fish, from the giant 60-foot long whale shark to the tiniest sea horses. (See full NY Times story linked below.)

And thus, this aquarium as well as all others which do the same unnatural things to “replicate” nature have their critics. While aquarium founders and directors claim that by attracting millions to view fish in their more-or-less natural habitat they serve an educational purpose, alerting visitors to our contributions to the degradation of the oceans, others say that these mega-aquariums do just the opposite—because endangered marine species are “preserved” in aquariums, the very fact of these incredible displays suggests that oceans are disposable. Who needs oceans when we have this wondrous facility?

Not deterred by this criticism, Bernard Marcus, Home Depot’s co-founder and the principal funder of the Georgia Aquarium, shot back when Ralph, one of his whale sharks died after he stopped eating as the result of the tanks having been treated with chemicals to kill an infestation of parasites, Mr. Marcus said that his gift to the city would “improve on nature” and that “if you asked the fish if they want to go back to the ocean, you know what they would say? ‘Are you crazy?’”