Page 8 - TBAS-apr-2018

-8- TBAS April 2017 ....................

Occassionally I have someone who has a fish, usually an Oscar (Astrono-
tus ocellatus) that is listless and eating very little. The water checks out fine and
the diet seems good. Or the owner is away on vacation and the fish won’t eat.
Some people find it difficult to believe that fish have intelligence and feelings. But
anyone who has kept fish for any length of time knows that they recognize the
person who feeds them. So do fish get depressed?
In their natural habitat there are challenges all the time: finding food,
guarding their territory, finding a mate (sounds familiar). The smarter the fish the
better it survives and reproduces - Darwin’s theory simplified.
I had an Oscar that kept a pet goldfish. He would chase it around until he
had cornered it and then back off and laugh (I swear). But they were also the best
of friends and even slept next to each other at night. The Oscar kept breaking the
heater so I piled several lava stones around it. Every day some of them had been
moved and just when he would expose the heater I would pile them back up and
it would start all over again. One day just for fun I threw in a couple of ping pong
balls. The Oscar got me back for that. He would bounce them off the lid in the
middle of the night making a loud KAPOW sound. I also put several plastic plants
with fishing weights attached. These were moved constantly, too. In short I gave
my Oscar toys to entertain himself. As a result, I rarely had problems with his not
eating or his sulking in the back of the tank, until I went away on vacation. He did
not eat the whole week I was gone. The goldfish ate fine.

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