What are your parameters part 3 the final part
Welcome back to the final part of the question, what are your parameters. This time we are looking at hardness and phosphates, and then that is it for analytical chemistry for a while.
So dive in and learn a little more. I’m aware we’ve done hardness in another episode, but it never hurts to revisit this topic.
Why do we keep fish? Genuinely, why do we keep fish? I was asked this question by someone who was also asking why I kept snakes. And I struggled to articulate why… I, I, why, why this huge part of my life? It’s no longer a hobby for me. It’s, it’s, it’s a huge chunk of my life. It’s part of my business. It’s, It’s what I do day to day. Um, heaven’s sake, I’m sitting here recording a podcast on a Sunday evening. Um, talking about the damn topic. So that’s what we’re looking at tonight on the podcast. Why do we keep fish? Science has shown that fish keeping is incredibly beneficial for you. Or at least exposure to aquariums is incredibly beneficial to you. Researchers in Melbourne said that contact with nature may provide an effective population-wide strategy in prevention of mental ill health. And this particular infographic I’ve got up in front of me is specifically looking at how fish can be great for you. If you’re struggling with your mental health, I hate the fact that people come up with trite things like, oh, go for a walk in the woods. But I would strongly suspect that a lot of us got into this hobby By accident or not really knowing what we were getting into with fish keeping. And now we are We’ve discovered that it calms us down. It makes us feel better. Did you know just looking as a fish tank can lower your heart rate and your blood pressure? I think as fish keepers then we notice something wrong and the benefits all go away. But that’s true. Um, Plymouth University and Exeter. Decided that to do a study and they found that actually just literally looking at an aquarium, um, can calm you down. There was, um, a study at the National Marine Aquarium in England and people who just looked at the fish in the aquariums reported increasing um, so they said they felt better So they sort of reported their mood. They said like they felt good or bad. I don’t know. Maybe it was on a scale of one to ten with one feeling like hell and ten feeling like you’re on top of the world. And it improved just by looking at the tanks. The people with Alzheimer’s showed that I’m just watching a fish tank reduce the disruptive behaviors. They ate better, they had less physical aggression. We know that, um, some limited studies have shown that watching a fish tank and then eating, you might eat in a more mindful way. Disruptive behaviors in children can heavily be improved. Heavily be improved. What sort of phrase is that? Can be improved by watching, uh, fish tanks. I think there’s also a lot to be said for involving the children in the care because actually fish keeping can be very easy wins. You got up in the morning and the buggers are still alive. And with some fish tanks, you go, yay, wonderful. So… Oh my god, I’m sorry. This’ll, this’ll get edited out. This is just going on the Patreon one. You know, I said I had an infographic in front of me that I was sort of looking at. It then goes, how do I get started? Set up your own fish tank in five easy steps. Set up the tank and stand. Step two. Install filter and add gravel. Step three. Add water and heat. Step four. Prepare tank. Step five, and the prepare tank has a bottle of, is that beneficial bacteria or is that dechlorinator? It doesn’t say it’s just a bottle. Step five, add fish. And I’m reasonably sure, yeah, that’s tropical in with Meereen. Well done. It’s only a cartoony drawing. But oh my god, this is why my blood pressure goes so high. Five easy steps to setting up a fish tank. No, no way in hell. Yeah, yeah. Fish keeping isn’t simple. And there’s this overall opinion that we should just tell people how easy it is and then we’ll get them hooked on the hobby and who cares if a few animals die along the way. Jeez, we’re the only hobby that that’s allowed. Yeah. Anyway, I will edit that out and we can all go on with less ranty stuff. Now, I asked the question on the groups, uh, the group and the page, oh, on Facebook, um, as to why people kept fish, and there was a lot of nice answers, that they’re relaxing, that it’s really helped their mental health. Um, there was one absolute idiot who came on. My freezer is full of them. Some for bait. Most to eat. Yeah, that was on the page. So he’s obviously not a fish keeper. He’s, he’s just, you know, like actual fishing. Um, and looking at his photo, is he American? Yeah, who knows. Um, social media. People are idiots. Anyway, back to that one. Making and watching an environment that’s completely different and I think that’s a great reason. There was one that I was, people said I found the chemistry behind it fascinating, love watching the tank. A couple of sarcastic ones which I actually agree with. I like to spend money on multiple expensive things. Four fully planted high-tech tanks and a twenty degree C heated outside koi pond, which then cost me more than £280 a month in electricity to run. Um, yeah, I was paying more than that on my fish house, so, oop, yeah. So relaxing with the filter cleaning, forgetting to either unplug or lift intake out of the water, thus flooding the living room. Heat is blowing, light’s going wrong, has timer settings, but can I work it out? Can I heck? Et cetera, et cetera. No effing idea. I feel your pain, Janice, there. Um, I’m gonna go with one. Oh, come on, where’s it, come on, where’s it, come on, where’s it, come on, where’s it, come on, where’s it, come on, there’s one, right. Dare I say it, my twin ladies won a fish at a fair. I still cringe nearly three years later at how we started. One of twin ladies is autistic, the fish is definitely hers, meltdowns have gone, much more relaxed little lady, and the fish are my time thieves, and they think that I’m their rich best friend. I think that’s an amazing thing to think about. That we can help, in this case, um, an autistic, uh, young lady, the hobby can help her to such an extent that her life can be improved. And you might go, well, that’s amazing for neurodivergent people, but I’m neurotypical. And yeah, a lot of us aren’t neurotypical. And I think the fish hobby does attract those of us who are neurodivergent. So I think a lot of it is we love the hobby. We hyper-focus on it. We can learn. It’s contained. And to a certain extent, as long as you keep up with the maintenance, If life starts to get a bit too much, you can just let things tick over in the tank. And when you’re ready, you can rescape and start again and really jump back into it. So let me go through my reasons pretty quickly and there’s a lot of people who agree with me on this one. I love learning and fish keeping allows me to do that. I love learning about the chemistry side of things, I love learning about the biology side of things, I love learning about biotopes and individual species, and fish keeping is at such The knife edge of research now. Not for the aquarium. I’m not even going to pretend it is. But there’s a lot of research going on for conservation side of things. For, um, farming for fish food side of things. Zebra danios are used in a lot of medical research so there is an incredibly huge amount of research out there and there’s nothing stopping us just dipping in and out and reading and just enjoying that side of things. I love the pet side of things and I’m gonna go a little bit more into it. I almost quit the hobby a few years back. Uh, not even a few years back. Yeah, maybe two years. I’ll tell you why because it’s a long and complicated story. I’ll tell you why in a second. Um, but a pet fish got me back in and got me, I think, back on track to starting to rebuild my own life. There’s the whole creating a little miniature world and I think that for me is fascinating. I have to get to, I’d have to, I get to, I get to choose to, to bring an animal into my life. And then I can spend hours, days, weeks, months trying to make their lives better. And that can be from a whole variety of things. Is it making sure that they have the right water chemistry? Is it making sure they have the right food? For things like my cichlids, are they getting enough enrichment? Are they getting enough mental stimulation? And I think that side of things is amazing. I’m challenging myself more with planted tanks this year. That’s going to be a fun journey. I will mess things up. But guess what? I’m going to have fun along the way while I do that. And yes, the mental health side of things, the calming, the, the, the, just making life a little bit nicer. But I think one that we can forget is really that side of it being a real pet. So why did I almost quit fish keeping a few years back? My dad was suffering from dementia and I’m not talking about early stages. I am talking about well into dementia and we weren’t getting much help because he hadn’t really been diagnosed properly. On top of that, my mum was also quite ill. Um, I just left my job After I was a teacher for kids with additional needs, um, and I don’t mean by that, I mean kids who were disabled, I mean kids who were violent mostly. I just left my job with really violent kids after the 20th attack I’d had. And the only, oh, and the area where I was living, we were having high crime rates and my dog was getting older and life was just in a really horrible position. And a kid broke into my back garden and he ran across my fish house. And that would have been fine except my fish house wasn’t new by any means. And he put a foot through the roof. And I, this was overnight and I didn’t notice because I was asleep. And it poured down with rain and all the rubbish off the roof poured through that gap and into two or three tanks. And it was cold and miserable and I lost some of my best fish. The cold also meant that uh, the heaters didn’t keep up with some and some of the tanks just went too cold and I lost some fish. Beyond that, the fish house was wrecked, so I couldn’t, it wasn’t like I walked in the next morning, did some water changes, four or five tanks had gone, um, the roof was just pretty much beyond repair at that point. I did some jerry-rig repairs which got me through the next few weeks. I managed to sort of re-home a lot of my fish, moved a lot on. And it just felt like I’d lost the love for the hobby. Too much was going on. I wasn’t really able to take care of the fish properly. Um, I wasn’t enjoying it. Then a lot of trouble happened on social media side of things in the midst of all this. And I just decided that enough was enough. I was going to run down my tanks. I was going to take a break from it all. And then if I ever felt like it, I’d come back to it. At that point, I didn’t think I’d ever feel like it. I was still really gutted over losing those fish because I’d got to know some of them. Um, I’m a bugger for falling in love with individual fish. It’s me. It happens. So I was selling off some of the, um, stock from when we closed the group shop. Another store had bought it. And I dropped off some bits to him, and I had a little bit of store credit with him, not a lot. And I knew I probably wasn’t going to get it in cash. So I was having a little wander around while he was talking to customers, thinking, ah, if I see anything I like. Might pick up some fish. I don’t really want to get back into buying fish. Ah, let’s see what he’s got. And tucked to the back was a pair of Oscars. One about twice the size of the other. And on each side were, the big one, was maybe five or six huge injuries. Um, the flesh was opened right the way down to the muscle and even the muscle was starting to erode. There was no infection. Well, there was some, but limited infection, I should say. There wasn’t, like, massive infection. But it was clear that fish wasn’t going to last very long in a shop tank. He needed a hell of a lot of care. Now I always say don’t rescue fish that are injured. Rescue marketing is a thing. Um, these had been brought in by a customer because they were injured and he said they’d been attacked by his other fish and it was heater burn and The story seemingly had changed a few times. So I said to the sharp owner, I said, come on, I’ll take those two. And he was like, okay, you know. So I took him home. And I spent the next three weeks doing some of the most intense fishy first aid I’d ever had to do. And I think I sort of got to the point where Think if I’d have lost those two fish, I’d have quit fish keeping completely. And… I, yeah, I’ll do more on how I save them, but it was basically meth blue in the tank. And because of that, I couldn’t run a filter. Because I couldn’t run a filter, I was having to do 100% water changes. Um, I threw several different types of meds at them over the next few weeks. And then one day I looked at them and realized the wounds hadn’t got any worse. Maybe they were getting better. And that was the turning point. Um. A few months later, you could barely tell. Sadly, the little one didn’t make it. Um, lasted maybe three, four months with me, but just never thrived, never bounced back. The big one bounced back and is Sam. So I’m the Oscar. And I’d never once, I’d had an Oscar years previous and I hadn’t really got on with it. It was quite liable to jump out the water and go for your face. I mean that literally. You’ve never lived till you’ve bent over a tank and an Oscar’s come out and bitten the end of your nose. That was, yeah, yeah, not a nice experience. Um, So I didn’t really, I didn’t really want bruiser cichlids again. And I just fell in love with this damn fish. And I know because he’s had a bad start in life and I don’t know how old he is, I might wake up tomorrow and he’ll be gone. But I think I’ll always be thankful because he forced me to stop And to pause and to realize if I was that invested in keeping a badly battered Oscar, which let’s be completely honest, guys, they’re incredibly easy to get hold of. Was that invested in keeping him alive? Then maybe I was really still invested in the hobby. So yeah, I bounced back. Took me a little while. I was in the, I sort of knew I was going to be moving house in the previous, in the forthcoming years and I’ve now moved. So I’m now building the hobby back up again. And next year I’m gonna get myself a new fish house and this time it will have a more secure roof and yeah, I’ve got no worries about kids running over where I’m now living. But I think I can sum up why I keep fish in one sentence. And I’m hoping that maybe it’s the same for you guys. I keep fish because I enjoy it. And I think that’s all you really have to worry about. Thank you very much for joining me tonight, guys. I am hoping you enjoyed. Um, if you are listening to this on Patreon, thank you so much. Um, if you are not, could you please consider, it’s two pounds or two dollars a month, I think it is, Um, and that helps us keep the groups running, offering help to people. We have our new Fish Welfare UK, um, that’s going to be building up gradually. Um, and over there you get the unedited versions of this podcast where I ramble even more than I have tonight, trust me. Um, and there’s the odd occasional complete rant. Because it’s me. Um, you also get all the podcasts twenty-four hours, previous twenty previous twenty Start that one again. You also get the podcast twenty-four hours before I release them on the other platforms. Um, and it’s a bit more of a space where we can discuss because something emails me every time someone comments. So yeah, you can come along. We can have a little bit of more discussions. I will be doing some lives over there. Um, but don’t worry. All the other stuff’s available if you don’t want to do that. Uh, but anyway, thank you very much for joining me.
