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Once I had a goldfish who lived in a pot. I know that’s wrong, but you see, it was a rescue and I really didn’t have anywhere else to keep it. It took a while to find an actual goldfish bowl to move it to. (And yes, I now know even that turns out to not be enough for them. It was a long time ago.)
The difference in behavior was pretty remarkable. Initially it was ready to try swimming through the wall every time there was a sound a couple of rooms over. It took it a little while, but pretty soon it was acting like you expect goldfish to, being interested in seeing you because food and so on.
Fish don’t have the kind of faces you can read emotion on, but I think they experience stress and fear more strongly than people give credit for. Honestly, especially the first, considering how often fish that have experienced poor conditions just…catch something random and die, even afterward.
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This is increasingly something I"m seeing in the angling world. People are starting to think a bit more critically about things like catch and release fishing (it’s been banned in at least one place I know of in Canada because of its impact on fish), holding fish by the gills, and tailing gloves (the gloves people wear to hold fish).
The standard response is always something like, “The fish swam away just fine,” which helps the angler feel better about their actions. But experiments are starting to tell a different story. One I keep seeing is a brook trout that’s been handled using a glove and then released. The first is fine at first, but over the course of two weeks it slowly dies because the protective coating has been removed by the glove.
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I was thinking Ride of the Valkyries.
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Me, too. Some fly shops are running photo contests that require that entries have to be of fish that stay submerged for the photo op.
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I love that they’re making that a part of their contests. It creates good fish handling habits. I think Trout Unlimited is doing a similar push right now to encourage people to either not take photos of the fish they’ve caught at all or to leave them in the water at the very least.
I fish alone 95% of the time, so taking pictures of fish in the water is pretty much my only option. I’d stop taking pictures altogether, but they’re just so damn pretty I can’t help but try and capture it.
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Agreed, and thank you for doing that. I only take pictures of truly exceptional fish. Since I mostly fish stillwaters from a pontoon boat, I can keep them underwater in my oversized, silicone-web net and get pretty good pictures.
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My new trick for stillwaters is to take a video of me picking the fish up from the net and putting it back in the water. It’s in the air handful of seconds at most and then it’s back off to find something else to eat. I can usually grab a decent shot of the fish in the process. Unless I’m in my belly boat, then it’s just in the water the whole time if I’m feeling brave enough to take a picture like that.
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