Keepers of the Wild Why Do We Keep Fish? by Abigail Weinberg ittle multi-colored fish flit around in plastic bags a professor of dance at Princeton and author of Parlor displayed on a table in the Queens Botanical Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Garden basement. Some of the fish were raised Aquarium, 1850–1970. in New York. Others were from Central America by “For some, the excess really comes from way of Kentucky. All were for sale at tonight’s fish wanting to get as close to nature as possible,” Hamera auction, awaiting new homes in fish tanks across the said. “Part of it is the desire to bring this wilderness city. scape into the home as virtuosically as possibly, as The fish swam in their bags while Rusty Wessel naturalistically, as masterfully as possible.” regaled about 60 tropical fish enthusiasts — mostly Joe Ferdenzi, Joseph Ferdenzi men, mostly graying — at the Greater City Aquarium a formerly QueensSociety’s monthly meeting. Wessel is a celebrity based fish keeper who of sorts, having built a second house for his 8,000 now lives in Nassau gallons of fish in Kentucky. Tonight he had flown to County, says that he New York with his fish in Kordon Breathable bags, doesn’t even think in which they can live for weeks, to share his secrets of his fish as pets. “I about livebearers, fish who carry their eggs in their thought of them as bodies and give birth just part of this little to live offspring. Some miniature world I was of the fish on the table creating,” he said. His miniature worlds now total were livebearers he had more than 60 fish tanks in his basement. scooped from the wild Down in Kentucky, Wessel’s fish house takes during one of his four imitation of nature to an extreme. He started keeping yearly collection trips fish as a nature-obsessed pre-teen in Kentucky, and to Central and South by the time he was 10 he had about a dozen aquaria. Rusty Wessel America. His father eventually built him a fish room in their Wessel told the audience how they could basement, and the number of tanks multiplied to about determine a fish’s species by the shape of its dorsal fin, 20 or 25. and about how overpopulation and overfishing have Now, Wessel keeps about 100 aquaria in his fullydamaged South American fish populations. The group automated fish house, separate from his own home. nodded, as if they understood a second language. Wessel spent three years and $100,000 building the When Wessel said that tilapia had been introduced to house by hand. The fish tanks include a mechanism to a pond of livebearers in Central America, the audience change the water automatically. The many windows let out a collective groan, and someone yelled, “Oh, provide natural light, and the temperature fluctuations come on!” (Tilapia are often aggressive and can prey in the house resemble those of Central and South on smaller fishes like livebearers.) American biotopes. All Wessel needs to do is feed For many fish keepers, like Wessel, what began the fish once a day and clean the filters and glass as a hobby spiraled into a lifestyle. Data about the periodically. number of fish keepers is scarce, but the hobby dates “I wanted it to basically mimic what the fish do to the 1850s, when the market for ornamental fish, in nature,” Wessel said. “People tell me all the time, tanks and books on the hobby began to flourish. ‘This is the best fish room ever.’ I don’t know that it is, Now hobbyists gather at local and regional meetings but I know it works for me.” and conventions, competing for the rarest and most Most of the New York-based attendees at Wessel’s pristine specimens while attempting to preserve presentation don’t have the luxury of building separate endangered species in the face of climate change and houses for their fish, so they improvise, cramming fish habitat destruction. tanks into the nooks and crannies of their apartments. Fish are very different pets from cats or dogs or Dan Radebaugh, Editor of the GCAS periodical, birds — and not just because they don’t make noise. Modern Aquarium, keeps about 10 tanks and 800 They are, by nature, undomesticated, and part of their gallons of water and fish in his Jackson Heights allure is that they are samples of nature. This desire to apartment: one in the living room, one in the dining replicate nature within a fish tank often leads a hobby room, two in the hallway and six in the office, plus a to become a full-blown obsession, says Judith Hamera, one-gallon tank containing a Betta fish. Modern Aquarium - Greater City A.S (NY) May 2021 13
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