Half-decent Aquarium

Published on 06/01/2008

Apparently, if you want your blog to be famous and successful, you need animals. Honestly, I can remember where and when chemists began to like kittens. I don’t know who is to blamed for putting pictures of them in their posts. Thing is, he or she was a genius and, perhaps indirectly, found the secret to make a blog popular. Kittens, however, aren’t the only animals bloggers write about: unsurprisingly, mice are featured too. I have never had a pet, although I have always thought that if I were to choose one, I would pick a dog. But I would never do such a stupid thing as having to look after an animal while being a student: that’s something you do when you’re older and your children endlessly ask you to buy a little, cute and little pet for Christmas, that will eventually turn into a wild beast within a couple of years (and by that time your now-teenager heirs will have lost any interest in it).
My cousin has pretty much the same opinion on this problem but, apparently, his flat mate is very mean and bought him two goldfishes. He liked the idea so much he decided not to instantly murder them, choosing, perhaps, a gory method, but started, despite their incredibly mediocre IQ, to responsibly treat them as proper pets.
Predictably enough, when he went away for Christmas I was kindly asked to take care of them, feeding and changing the water regularly and so on. I thought it was my turn to let animals creep into my usual endless descriptions of drugs, diseases and syntheses. At least they gave me the inspiration for this post.

The water in the picture above is clearly dirty and needs to be changed. But this operation can’t be repeated too frequently or the fishes die (I was told so by a wise man, who always knows best). That gave me an idea: what about adding phenol red to the water, like we do with cells. I mean, just by looking at the colour of your flask, you can tell when you’ll have to split them because already confluent and, moreover, in a medium too acid (because of metabolic waste products, dead cells, debris, etc.) and lacking nutrients.
An aquarium which turns yellowish, would clearly indicate the goldfish are swimming in a not ideal environment. And don’t think the idea of using it on organisms other than cells is weird and mad: in the past, your physician might have injected a solution of phenol red in your veins, so that it reaches the kidneys, gets eliminated in the urine and you can perform a colorimetric titration to assay the filtering efficiency of your kidney.
It’s not that pointless to administer phenol red in goldfishes, either: back in 1970s, this seems to have been something scientists were keen to do.

And it’s not pointless, above all, to feature this theme here because, although I’ll never waste my money on cheap phenol red to see what happens, next year, I want to win the “Most Awesome Blog” awards. So I need pets…Wink


Comments

  1. J
    06/01/2008 | 15:05

    Oh, I do LOVE the fish.

  2. psi*psi
    06/01/2008 | 15:45

    Come on, now. Fish are not NEARLY as cute as kittens! And they're harder to keep alive. I mean, my cats are pretty low-maintenance, but if I forget to feed them...they don't let me sleep.
    Fish? I used to have bettas (much more colorful than goldfish). THEY never reminded me they were hungry. And sometimes they went crazy and tried to jump out of their bowls. But then we got the cats...and...we never tried to keep fish again.

  3. Uncle Al
    06/01/2008 | 17:40

    Goldfish grow to fit their environment. A big aquarium will get you something monstrous, a pond will get you duckling eaters. When spring arrives, go for the Big Kahuna with a couple of dozen feeder goldfish and an suspecting body of fresh water.

  4. psi*psi
    07/01/2008 | 21:41

    Man. I wish my CATS grew to fit their environment... :D

  5. Richard
    07/06/2008 | 19:24

    Hamsters now thats what bloggers need...lol

Leave a Reply

Comments are moderated to prevent spam. This may cause a delay before your post appears.