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The first of the daily podcasts, with news, info, and the usual rants when I get on to a favourite topic or two. It’s not all about keeping fish, but stuff that might interest fish keepers.
A daily round up of the stories I’ve come across, science info, and things about fish keeping that I think you might be interested in.
Today we look at who I am, some fishy news, and why today is an important anniversary for Tropical Fish Keeping UK.
Untitled – April 10, 2025
Welcome to this. So this is probably the first time of me just doing a podcast talking to you guys. Depends where you’re seeing it. If you’re seeing it on the page, it’s going to be a video. Might be on YouTube. I don’t know. But anyway. The plan is it’s going to be like a daily thing. I’m hoping there’ll be all sorts of rants, information, lots about the history of fish keeping because that’s something I’m really into right now. Maybe some rants? Maybe a few rants. But it’s all… it’s mostly gonna be about fish.
Okay. For those who don’t know me, my name is Ruth, and I was lucky enough to grow up sailing around the world. Mostly in the tropics. So I swam, snorkelled and dived with a lot of the tropical fish we keep in our tanks, both freshwater and marine. When we got back to the UK I went to uni, and whilst I read archaeology and then forensic archaeology for my masters, I soon found myself researching fish. So, there’s a lot actually involved in archaeology and fish because actually in England we seem to like to eat them a lot. When I got into forensics, my dissertation topic was fish in the canals and rivers of Britain and how they use human remains. Remember, forensics. Then I wandered off on a real tangent. I just started researching fish.
I taught science at uni and at college, and that was sort of the forensic science-y side of things, but also the animal management and animal welfare side. Then seven years ago today, exactly today, I made a choice. I took on a little social media group and I said the words, there’s only a Facebook group. It’s not exactly life-changing. I was wrong. So now most of my time is taken up with the group, helping people on the group, doing the Facebook-y side of things on the group. But also we have a little online shop to help fund said group, and I sit on the Companion Animal Sector Council, which is a council that helps advise the devolved governments and British governments Um, on animal welfare. And specifically, I am the fishy chair. So there’s a sub taxa group for fish. Apologize for the wind outside, guys. I can’t control the weather as much as I’d like to claim I can. So I am, I sit as the fishy chair. Teaching totally in my rearview mirror now. And today, I’m starting a little new adventure. This.
So, for the first time I was talking to you guys, I really couldn’t decide what to talk about, and I’ll be honest, I probably could have got it out sooner if I’d have decided what would be the first topic. So, what is a fish? I must admit that was a leading contender for a while. Being overdone. I do want to talk about what is a fish and how it really should impact our fish keeping but not for the first one. And then I thought maybe all those like frequently asked questions on the group There’s so many that I think they each deserve their own talk and a few rants. So I thought I’d leave those to future episodes. Then I asked a question. What do you love about fish keeping? It was actually what you love and what you hate about fish keeping. But what do you love about fish keeping? And I suddenly thought, what do I like about fish keeping? What do I love about fish keeping?
For me, there’s an absolute joy in watching my fish. If Sam will come into view, Sam should be behind me, he’s now, the second I turned the camera on, he went, nope, I’m off. I do love watching my fish. I have more than one fish that’s an actual pet, a real character. Sam’s a great example. You can see the tank below, the big tank behind me. There’s a Sino I’ve had for god knows how long. He’s a real pet. Um, I’ve got all sorts. And they’re as much pets to me as my reptiles, as my cats. Not quite as much as my dogs because they don’t try and climb on me and lick me. But you know, give Sam his time, he’ll probably try at some point. I love the peace of sitting surrounded by tanks. I love the challenge of making a tank look pretty, especially when you’ve got things like Sam, when you’ve got fish that maybe need specific water conditions, you’ve got a low pH tank, you try and keep plants growing when your pH is sitting at about five It’s possible. It’s just a bit of a challenge. And I do like the challenge of breeding certain species. Ignore the dog in the background. I apologize.
But I think what I love the most is how fish keeping has made me really aware of the world beyond my tanks. I’m specifically, I’m mostly talking about conservation here. Because conservation is often about those high-profile species. The elephants, the polar bear, the gorillas, the dolphins. But all too often, Often a muddy brown fish in a water in muddy river being destroyed by pollution or overfished or gradually warmed up beyond what the fish can actually survive, that’s not going to get the same high profile impact. One of the group experts told me a story. She went to a zoo in China and everyone was crowding around to see the pandas. And she wanted to see the Yangtze River Dolphin. The Yangtze River Dolphin is probably extinct now. But everyone wanted to see the pandas. I mean, she got to see them. But it’s that sort of thing. And that’s a mammal. But it’s a mammal that isn’t as cute and as cuddly, as fluffy as pandas are. So, the gradual death of a single subspecies of rhino, that’s in the news. Anything happens to those, what are we down to now, two of them? Two females? We’re gonna hear about it. But the final declaration came in the last week that the Chinese paddlefish is extinct. And that’s almost gone unnoticed. The last one was seen in 2003 To be honest, we’ve been pretty sure for a while they’ve gone. And that means that any that were of similar age to that one that was seen in 2003 will now have died. And that’s a giant species. And it slipped into the pages of history with barely a ripple. The same is happening all over the world.
The zebra plec, I wrote about this, this, was it this week? Was it last week? Pass. Um, and that’s a real aquarium favorite. It’s small. It’s cute. It’s stripey. You can see it. It’s relatively good at coming out for a plec. I mean, come on. We’ve all had plecs that have vanished and we’ve never seen them again. You’re stripping your tank down like ten years later going, oh, I never forgot I had you. It’s under siege, and it’s under siege in every direction, and the aquarium hobby needs to hold its hand up and say, overfishing for the aquarium hobby was a real problem. We’ve got to. We’ve got to be self-aware enough that we can say that. But there was also a dam built, and the problem with that is we thought at the time that Zebra Plec really only thrived in a specific zone of depth, and when the dam was built that obviously changed the river depths. So, don’t get me wrong, it’s caused problems, but it wasn’t the complete, complete disaster for the species. It was bad, but there are still some in the wild. Now there’s an even bigger risk coming out. In the Amazon region, there’s been several cases, so often toxins from mining, and this is metal mining, all sorts of things out there. The toxins from that are held back by earthen dams, and these earthen dams are known to have collapsed and one collapsed not that long ago and caused death of people and absolute destruction to the habitat. And these earthen dams are now being built in that region, in the very, very tiny zone that Zebra Plec live in. So this poor fish is absolutely under siege. And it’s just gone on to, or sorry, it’s just been proposed to go on to Appendix one of Cites.
So what that means is that Basically, you can’t import and export them. You’ve got to have a license to do it if you do need to. And if you’re breeding them in the UK, you’ll have to prove your offspring were captive bred in the UK. And you’ll probably be able to sell them in the UK, no problems. Whether or not we’ll be able to import them from, say, Asia, where the big farms are, pass. It’s just waiting to see what comes out in the wash on that one. It’s not just the source of the aquarium fish. I remember there was a big thing that the coelacanth, I mean, come on, the coelacanth, the living fossil, the great case of something that we knew was extinct turned out not to be extinct. Part of its habitat’s been under threat by the building of a new port. This was a while ago, and I hold my hands up, I don’t know whether the port went ahead, I’m pretty sure it did. But they were just planning on blasting their way in. So even, think of something as famous as the coelacanth. Yeah, that’s the problem. Gold mining. Gold mining can devastate areas of the Amazon. If you ever want to have a laugh, um, do you remember the Discovery series like, uh, Gold Rush? I’m going to go with Gold Rush. They did one in South America. Look at how much damage they caused just, just to the area around their camp site Now imagine that’s on a major scale. Now imagine that the chemicals being used to separate the gold are being washed into the river. Even just things like you have a lot of the species we keep that need to see each other to breed. So you then put an absolute mess of muddy discharge from the gold mines into that, they’re not going to be able to see as easily. These are causing real problems. And so many of these species, and I think I’m more aware of this in cases I’ve seen from the Amazon and having lived in South America for a while, so many of these species live in really tiny locations.
Cichlids are really good at evolving, which means that a single species can have evolved into a very tiny area. I mean, the zebra plex is an example of another species, another genus managing it. But you can get a scenario where a cichlid species has evolved on one side of a river bend and it can’t get anywhere else because there’s deep water with predators so it remains trapped there. You may also find that they evolve above or below rapids. If you want to see a great case of evolution, there’s the guppy that we all know and love, and there’s a very similar related species. I’m pretty sure at one point we thought it was guppies, and they don’t interact at all. They are immediately above and below the saline line, so the line where salt’s coming in and out. So you can get incredibly small ranges for fish. And they can be destroyed. And they can be destroyed easily. And I think for me, finding out about that sort of thing is fascinating. And I think it’s really what fish keeping’s allowed me to do. Let’s look at wild caught species. Um, are they good? Are they bad? Don’t worry, I’m gonna have a whole rant on wild caught. There will be plenty of this. Um, in some areas this is done with poison and destruction. I’ve actually seen cyanide fishing, I’ve seen explosives fishing. Um, in other areas it’s very careful there’s a collection of excess fish. So you have seasonal rainy seasons and seasonal dry seasons. In the dry seasons, thousands of fish die as the big lake they were in suddenly becomes a big mud pit and they die. But it’s alright, they’ve laid their eggs in time. Well, what they sometimes do is they go out and they collect the ones that would have been those, the dead fish. Um, and it’s very, very careful. Or they collect the ones that, due to over-predation, um, lack of food, the excess stock, and there’s Sammy’s back in picture. They would capture them and they very, very carefully control this sort of thing. And that puts money into areas that could be totally impoverished without this sustainable income. Captive bread is the other side of that particular coin. And that’s everything- now I’m never gonna use it for- I’m never gonna use it. Watch me now say it every single time. I try and avoid using the word tank bread because that is actually bread in a tank. So, the fry that’s bred in my tanks, that’s tank bred. Sometimes on these farms, we ain’t talking about tank bred, things like the common plec, they’re often bred in huge mud pits. This is a totally different type of breeding than… A few tanks. So, yeah, from the frying my tanks through to these huge commercial farms. Some are amazing. Some of them, they’re going in there, they are selecting the best fish for tanks. They’re breeding very, very carefully for that robustness. Yes, they’re breeding for colour, but they’re also breeding for health. Some of them are absolutely amazing. Not all of them. Some are regularly losing fish into local rivers. I’ll probably tell you this story time and time again. I remember when I was swimming in South Africa and South American fish was swimming past me. And that was because years earlier, um, and I will say this is just towards the end of apartheid when I lived in South Africa the first time. Um, During apartheid, they hadn’t been able to export the fish from a local breeding facility upriver from where I was living. Now, that had fallen into rack and ruin and in floods a lot of the fish had been washed out and had escaped. They thrived. They absolutely thrived. To the expense of the native fish. It’s… We’ll go, I’ll rant about that another time. But there are positives and negatives of both sides. And I think as fish keepers we need to be aware of that. We need to really be looking into it.
I mean, something I found out very recently, the coral red pencil fish, I love those, I’ve been lucky enough to own some, many of my friends have bred various pencil fish species, but I didn’t know that the coral red pencil fish was becoming massively overfished in the wild. The Amazon Research Center for Ornamental Fish, go and have a look at them, give them a follow, support them if you can, is trying to breed them on a commercial scale and already they’re seeing some success. And this research center is funded by people like us who donate. The idea being behind them is to provide income for local people, but also to help make sure the environment and the ecosystem is balanced. If you want to look at something else that we support and our shop will be supporting soon, Shoal. Shoal is the freshwater conservation arm that, like I say, we support. Also the Freshwater Life Project. It’s things like this that I think as Fish Keepers is really good for us to be involved in, to follow, and to learn from. I think the thing is though for me that once you get really into it you start to see that not only is the fish beyond our tanks, there’s fish beyond our planet.
The International Space Station quite regularly hosts fish. They’re a great model organism and they do things like they get space sick in the same way as us humans do. It’s interesting to see that there are some changes in breeding after being to the International Space Station. Did you also know there’s a whole journal dedicated to just looking at fish and scientific research? Uh, that’s a zebrafish journal. Did you know that fish in English canals don’t eat human remains? I will own up. I knew that one before I got, oh no, I was, I had thirty tanks when I was doing that research. So how can I say I wasn’t heavily into fish keeping? Okay, I got, I did that research before I got into social media, really. Yeah, awful dissertation topic for the record. Fish, if you’re gonna kill someone and throw them into a canal, don’t bother, they’re not gonna eat them. So I think that’s, that’s the, the, one of the main things about, for me, learning. Learning about the species I keep and how they react in the wild. So Sam, yep, you can just see him lurking. It’s tanks not that that dark, by the way. Just this camera has decided that it’s going to show reflections and nothing else.
Did you know that Oscars can actually survive in hypoxic conditions? Because sometimes when they’re guarding the eggs, the water will go very shallow as it goes into the drier season and the oxygen will just start to get reduced and reduced and reduced. And they can cope with that hypoxic conditions. Did you know that guppies are evolutionary marvels? I mean, every time I read more about studies into guppies, my brain goes, they’re just little tiny things that we just take for granted. Evolutionary-wise, they are amazing. Betta Splendons, I don’t care. I’m pronouncing it better for today. I might change my pronunciation. In case you’re wondering, there is, there is… A large debate on how you say better. The Siamese fighting fish then. That may have been altered over thousands of years because they were literally used as fighting fish. So as people captured really aggressive individuals, they may have kept them safe in particular ponds. Is it possible that they’re a hybrid of two species? Maybe, we don’t know. The Betta is an amazing example of human-animal interaction and how culture’s been shaped on one way and the fish on the other. Thousands of years that’s been going on for. It just amazes me.
But what did the groups come up with? I mean, I will be honest, they came up with what was probably the top ten positive things about keeping aquariums. Did you know that there’s a load of health benefits for aquariums? Watching fish swim in a calming way, i.e. not Looking at you, flicking red gills, showing you that there’s something wrong with your tank. Just swimming and being calm and nice. Do you know that actually can lower your blood pressure and your stress hormones? Which is fine because it’ll probably increase your blood pressure and stress hormones when something goes wrong. But anyway. Um, it can improve behavior in hyperactive children. I will say the studies haven’t been done in hyperactive adults, but you only need to go on the group and look in the comments to find so many neurodivergent adults. Find fish keeping calming, relaxing, and an actual coping mechanism for day-to-day life. Is that why there’s maybe more neurodivergent people in fish keeping? I don’t know, but I find it fascinating. Interestingly enough, if you put a tank in the dining room of care homes, one of the problems in care homes is getting residents to actually eat enough. And if you put a fish tank in, the residents actually eat more. We don’t know why. It’s probably because stress is lower. So… I’ve been keeping fish now for over twenty years. Um, I didn’t start keeping fish till I returned to England and I was an adult by then, just turned eighteen when I got back to England. So before then I was working on various projects with fish, but I couldn’t keep a fish tank on a boat. So, yeah, over twenty years, and I’m gonna be honest here, over the past couple of years, I think I fell out of love with fish keeping. I definitely fell out of love with the social media side of it, which is ironic considering what I do. But I really really wasn’t enjoying it, so I cut back on the number of tanks, um, I asked friends to take on some of my fish for me, and all my friends stepped up and said, yeah, yeah, no problems, we’ll have, you know. I made sure, like, so, Alan over in Nottingham took one of my snakeheads for me, and he’s a snakehead nut. So I cut back, right back, and then just focused on what I had. I mean, there’s no way I was getting rid of Sam. Yeah, there’s no way I was getting rid of that ancient Syno. I always like to have a tank of something like guppies around because, like I say, they’re evolutionary, fascinating little things. So I kept some things and then I started to explore what did I actually want to do? And. I’m starting to get that interest back. I want some small-scale breeding projects, not guppies. Oh, well, actually, no, I will say that one. I want to start looking at the real show quality. I don’t want to show guppies. I don’t have the patience to go to shows. Um, but I do want to breed some of the more unusual tail types, um, look at the colours and things like that. I think that could really keep my interest. I want to scape that thing behind me in a way that that thing behind me won’t just immediately destroy and have fun doing it. Do you know what I really want to do? There’s so many conservation projects involving fish in the UK, and the Goodyear Project, one of the main breeding projects for Goodyeards, that’s based down south in England. Chester Zoo has always got projects on. All around the world there’s all various conservation and welfare projects to do with fish. I want to go see them. I want to go and enjoy them and experience all these things. And then when I’ve done that, I think I want to start seeing some of them around the world. Now everyone else can go on a nice relaxing holiday. Me, no! I wanna go see this project in this weird place that’s gonna cost a fortune to get to. But I think I’d forgotten to have fun. And I think that’s gonna be my takeaway for you guys, for me. Don’t forget to have fun with it. Um, we’ve called the seven year project the seven year ick because I think we fell out of love a little bit, a few of us. And like some sort of weird marriage counseling. We’ve sort of stepped back and looked at what do we love about the hobby? What do we hate about the hobby? And yeah, changed. So, other than Chinese paddlefish slipping into being officially extinct, which sucks by the way, um, a giant fish, and that’s probably due to fishing for food, but mostly due to pollution. The Yangtze is awful for pollution, and as far as I’m aware, that was the main area that it’s found in. But back to that whole certain things get protection and others don’t. The Yangtze river dolphin, also extinct, probably extinct. And they’re trying to preserve areas just in case the Yangtze River dolphins found. What about the fish that are also slipping into extinction? Can’t we have like more of an overall view? Um, yeah, rant over. But what other news is there from the fish world? Um, there’s a great study out in Zebrafish, the journal I mentioned before, uh, just Google Zebrafish journal, about the best food to feed growing, I’m gonna say it was swordtails and rice fish. I’ve got it saved to read properly. From what I’ve had a quick look at, it’s interesting. But I’m going to say something, it only applies to fish in lab settings. Those species of fish in lab settings. You can’t tell me that we can extrapolate what you can feed a swordtail. Through to what you could extrapolate, what you could feed, say, I don’t know, red-tailed cat. Um, bad example. Snakeheads, angelfish, discus. Um… And also, here’s something to sort of look at. It applies to fish in a lab setting. And that’s one of the problems with the bulk of the dietary studies out there. So there isn’t an unlimited research budget. Um, many, far too many years in, in unis and academia, I know that the research budget is stretched. We really struggle to get research into things like cancer treatments, car safety. Do you want to know why we managed to get coronavirus vaccines through so they stop? Putting the paperwork in place, the roadblocks to get funding, they just said, oh, do you know what, actually? This might save lives, we’ll just fund it. Um, there’s none of that funding from public sources for pet fish. There’s a tiny amount of funding available and that’s going to come from two, a few sources, let’s say. Uni students. Uni students have to do research at the end of their degrees and some of them will do it on pet fish. However, Pick your level to get the quality of research. And that’s no offense to uni students. Um, I was one for many years. I have taught many of you. Would I trust something that an undergrad student has brought out? I’d read it, but I’d be incredibly skeptical. PhD students. They’re going to have to go for funding as well. And they might self-fund. They might be able to afford to self-fund. It’s not that common. So, specifically looking at the pet market, you’ve got pet food manufacturers and the people who research into food fish as in the stuff that we eat and We grow on for pets, other pets, so like, um, fish to feed to dogs and cats and things like that. And research fish, so zebrafish journal, for example, and it’s literally the, the articles about. Do you think the research into the food fish market really cares if your fish lives for a decade? Or do you think they want it to get to the biggest size as cheaply and as quickly as possible? And that’s something we’ve got to be aware of. Um, I’ll give you an example. We used to reduce the amount of protein that we put into fish diets. The reason behind that is because protein gives you nitrogen. Nitrogen is one of the basic molecules of ammonia. no lower protein levels lower ammonia levels sounds great except fish need protein that’s that’s one of the main things some fish can’t absorb carbohydrates So, they’re not taking in the carbs, that’s just bulkers. So, they’re only taking in the protein and the fats. Um, and if you’re reducing the protein, yeah, you can see where the problems start to come in. So, this isn’t to say research should all be thrown out. I mean, there’s some great stuff out there. I’ll give you an example. Dave Poole, he wrote the chapter on Freshwater Aquaria for the Vet Manual. And he’s put a lifetime of research knowledge into his own fish food brand, Fish Science. But what I’m saying is when you’re looking at the research, read it with that really careful, critical eye. What I like to do is look, there are some studies out there about what fish eat in the wild. Um, and that’s fascinating. There is a lot of studies out there that are more concerned with conservation, and so it should be. So, piggyback your reading on top of them, if you can. Say piggybacky reading on top of them. I’m trying to make out like I’m not writing a book on fish diets. Um, yeah. If I take the camera down at all, you’re just gonna see like the mounds of paper. Paper’s about that level just off screen. Yeah. Oops. Um, it’s number three on the list of books I need to get written. The first one being Seriously Skint, How to Save Money and Keep Fish. Uh, second is just a starting out guide because we see so many of you struggling with that when you start out. And then, yeah, diet. So I should be saying I need to be reading this with a really critical eye. I need to be doing this. But, you know, join me in your reading. But to finish with something that’s ultimately happier. Did you know that sticklebacks may pass on the information learned from other fish to their offspring via genetics? So the idea is that sticklebacks learn to avoid predators. and there’s a study by helman et al in animal behavior and it was published last year but they looked at how well the offspring could avoid predators even though some of the samples and some of the offspring had had no contact with the parents at all they were taking away as eggs Um, turns out they can learn from their fathers, even if the only thing he passed over was his genetics. So what’s that mean for our aquarium fish? Have they learned things from their parents, grandparents, etc., even though they’ve never met? Who knows? So join me tomorrow for more news stories and there’s going to be a rant. There is definitely going to be a rant. But thank you for joining me, guys.
