Tank Update...Farewell Giorgio...Comstock Covered Bridge...And Mission Statement, of Sorts...

We may have our first tank fatality.  Yesterday Giorgio, the elusive bottom feeder, was seen laying on the bottom, distressed, out of sorts.  I scooped him up with the net and he barely struggled.  When I let him go he just sunk to the bottom, moved a little bit, then landed on a rock and stayed there for quite a while, just gulping every so often.  Today he hasn't been seen.  I wondered if maybe ammonia had built up and was getting to him, or if he's even eaten anything since October, when he and the other fish were put in the tank. I just figure he's been eating algae, goldfish flakes leftover from the dace, and maybe dace poop, but I don't know.  I figured maybe it's time to change the water, so I panned off about half of it, cleaned the filter, cleaned the algae smear off the back glass of the tank, and then started pouring clean water back in.  I figured Giorgio would either be seen skulking around, or that his dead body would float up from whatever rock it had settled under.  But I didn't see him, so I don't know what the story is yet. The "bug", or the caddisfly larva, also has not been seen in a few days.  Possibly it is metamorphosing, or maybe already has done so.  I have not seen a caddisfly in the house yet, so who knows?

When I was replacing the water the dace all had a great time riding the temporary downspout of water and bubbles that would come pouring into one corner of the tank every so often.  Like I've said before, these fish seem to like to have fun playing in the tank, they know me as their provider and playmate and seemed to appreciate the stimulus of the fresh column of water in a different area of their world.  With the new water they seem more energetic, so I hope it wasn't water quality that distressed Giorgio.  If he's gone, I'll miss him.  He was a cool little fish, and is probably irreplaceable. He was most certainly caught by accident when my son netted the dace.  He was so well camouflaged, that trying to find another to replace him is impossible, and only another fluke by-catch could be hoped for.

We finally got some snow in the Pediddleville area.  Today I drove by the newly refurbished Comstock Covered Bridge and saw the new bridge with a coating of new snow. The river is running very high right now.  There is very little white water, even at the cascades above the swimming hole. The bridge spans Salmon River from Pediddleville to East Pediddleville. Growing up in East Pediddleville, my friends and I used to occasionally end up at the bridge with beers or whatever, and hang out in the pitch darkness of the bridge, listening to the river rushing underneath us.  Partying in a covered bridge is not something that most kids have the chance to do.  Originally built in 1873, it is one of three existing covered bridges in Connecticut.  To me, the updated bridge  looks too modern, too square.  Maybe after the wood siding ages to a dark brown it'll be better.  Of course it was never the same after they installed the security cameras and closed it at sunset years ago before the restoration.  So it'll still be never the same.  Or, it'll still never be the same, or something...

I thought I would go over my intentions for this blog.  This blog I have described as "A Deceptively Innocuous Blog About One Of My Favorite Places On Earth, Among Other Things".  So it is about Salmon River, but the "among other things" will be appearing sooner, hopefully, than later, depending on my various motivations and lacks thereof (I am a champion procrastinator).  It may get weird.  It may get political.  It will chronicle several threads of my life in Pediddleville.  I plan to post things I've written from many years ago and of course, new stuff. Maybe some music reviews.  Maybe a somewhat fictionalized chronicle of my struggle in the workplace.  I am treading a line between yearning to play music and yearning to write and yearning to do quite a number of other things that I simply don't have enough time for.  I work full time for a soul-crushing company that drains my physical and emotional energy, and what time is left is hectic, loud, cacophonous, and fraught with reasons to avoid the things that would make me feel better.  The American Dream...

A Little Piece Of The River In My House

It is four days after the New Year, 2012, and I'm sitting in an easy chair, more or less shell-shocked, in front of the fish tank.  This tank contains no cichlids, no frilly tropicals, or even goldfish.  Inside this thirty gallon tank are locals--fish captured out of Salmon River, just a minute or so from my home.  There are eleven Eastern Blacknosed Dace (Rhinichthys atralulus) ranging in length from one to three inches.  Also there are two other inhabitants--welcome accidental by-catches.  The first is Giorgio, which I believe to be a Northern Hogsucker fry (Hypentelium nigricans), an elusive bottom feeder.  My two young sons named him after Giorgio Tsoukalos, noted proponent of the "Ancient Aliens" theory.   Those two are chips off the old block as far as sense of humor goes.  They have a list of their "heroes", or rather their favorite celebrity buffoons, which also includes Paula Deen, Guy Fieri,  Emeril Lagasse, and News Channel 8's traffic reporter Teresa LaBarbera. The second by-catch inhabitant is a caddisfly larva (order Trichoptera), a worm encased in a tube glued together from twigs and hemlock needles.  He's just known as "the bug".

The dace are very active.  They have an elongated body, similar to that of a trout.  They are a brown mustard yellow color on top, silvery yellow underneath, and have a thick black stripe lined on top with a thin yellow line running the length of their bodies.  An interesting thing about the stripe is that it fades away in the dark.  If you turn on the aquarium light late at night they will not have the stripe, just a ghost image of it that will return over the course of  few minutes.

                                                                        King Dace

 
There is little information on the internet about the dace, just little blurbs from amateur scientist types, and field study term paper sites that seem to trail off after the semester was over.  Obviously their behavior in the tank is different from that of in their natural river home.  Who are these fish?  What do they want?  I realize it sounds preposterous for me, their captor, to pose these questions.  They're wild fish, and they want to go back to their home in Salmon River.  Those are the obvious answers, but I'm not so sure...

I don't imagine they develop much of a social order in the wild.  They may inhabit the deeper water, but I think I've only seen them in the shallow pools near the river bank in small groups of no particular allegiance.  They're just hiding from predators and looking for food.


In the tank, they seem to understand that they can cruise around in the open water with no concerns about getting picked off by a bass or a snapping turtle.  They know that the big face coming at them is there to feed them, not eat them.  When they see me coming, they all come right to the front of the tank and zip around in a tight little mass of circles right in front of my face, waiting for the food to appear from above.  Could it be possible they're saying 'hello' to me?


The largest of the dace is a full-grown three inches long.  The next two largest are only a bit more than half his length.  My sons named him "Daddy",  but I secretly call him "King Dace". He is the only one of the fish that I could say, and I do say, that I have a relationship with.  He often hovers at the front of the tank, looking at me looking at him.  He'll bob up and down in the filter current and turn this way and that, looking right at me, trying to figure me out. He is clearly the leader.  The others will school up with him at times, and I've seen two of the bigger ones doing some kind of mating dance with him, swimming along together in a spiral.  Sometimes after  feeding, he'll get fierce bursts of energy and zoom around, charging the others, who make sure to get out of his way.  Generally though, the tank society is peaceful.  As I said, they appear to have developed a school, which may not have been a behavior for them in the wild. They know they are safe from predators and they don't have to look for food, so they have lots of time on their hands, er,... fins, to figure out something else to do.  I think I know what that something else is--fun.  They really seem to be having fun in their safe little world.  We collected cool blue rounded river stones and gravel from the river bed, and made little caves for them to hide in--which they often do--and they zip around endlessly to the surface, to the bottom, all around, chasing each other, following King Dace.

They were all netted by my son one October Sunday morning under the half-finished renovation of Comstock Covered Bridge.  That day was a brief hiatus from a personal nightmare caused by a perfect storm-type scenario, a coming together of Climate Change and Corporate Greed and Mismanagement that would completely disrupt my life for nearly three months.  More on that in later posts.  The point is, this river runs through my soul.  I have loved this river my whole life, and spending time there with my family makes me happy, grounds me, keeps me from going berserk, and I think that having a little piece of it in my house will help me make it through the winter.