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.