A dream fish tank

Every fishkeeper dreams of “their” ideal aquarium.

 

Usually, it is a very large aquarium! Ah! If only we had the space…

We all dream of the mafia boss’s aquarium, forming the partition of his office and holding 50 piranhas in 10 cubic meters!

Or the one in the shopping mall, huge and hosting sharks...

 

Mine is no exception, but it is actually different from those huge aquariums, occupying an entire wall, and housing large fish that require such a large volume.

When I was a child, Pierre Perret sang “Open the birdcage.”

Of course, releasing bred canaries into the wild would not have been very wise. And the goldfish or Florida turtles, which, released into natural ponds and pools, have done great harm to our ecosystems.

But the question of captivity was raised.

I then became a fishkeeper, and the passion was all-consuming.

 

When I created the first poubellarium in 2004 (with that famous guppy now well known), the idea of opening the birdcage was there.

I wanted to give my fish, in the season when it was possible, a bit of wild life back. And it is true that the poubellarium is a compromise. Only a compromise, of course, because the fish remains captive and its environment remains limited in size.

But my guppy spent several months without suffering any of the stresses of captivity such as the noise of pumps (water is a very noisy medium), your brother-in-law tapping on the glass, the light suddenly turning on and off, and especially that transparent wall against which the fish is stopped, preventing it from truly hiding from you.

My guppy lived in opaque green water, well hidden. Its days were rocked by the wind brushing the surface, gentle or heavy rains, infinitely gradual changes in light and temperature. It ate the daphnia I gave it, raised in a bucket right next to it, but also a host of different insects and their larvae. Instead of two meals a day, it nibbled on something different almost all the time.

 

The notion of the fish’s pleasure overturned all fishkeeping dogmas: a fish’s health did not depend strictly on numerical parameters alone but on its pleasure, of which these parameters are only a tiny cause.

It is therefore in this vein that I imagine the aquarium of my dreams.

It would be a shallow aquarium (40 cm is more than enough), but extremely long.

If it could be 20 meters long, what a joy for me!

Of course, I do not have a room that would allow it, but that is also the nature of a dream.

 

A fish could then swim 20 meters straight if it wished. And, like in the course of a small brook, it would pass through different zones, some heavily planted, others rocky, some where the sand would rise and reduce the depth… In short, a succession of aquatic landscapes not separated from each other, uneven light, and the impossibility of seeing the whole aquarium at a single glance.

 

And in this aquarium, very few fish, chosen among the smallest, so that the space seems even larger to them. Very small cyprinids or characins. And critters, lots of critters, since in natural aquatic environments, there are many invertebrates while there are few fish. The Blackworms, water lice or ostracods would thus have a real chance to settle, the fish’s taking being reasonable.

If a bit of current is needed, then a single pump would take water at one end and return it at the other!

A little wild river at home.
My goodness, what a sight!