© Illustration by Hashime Murayama, Nat Geo Image Collection An illustration shows three types of goldfish swimming through aquatic plants. |
"Oh, wet pet," American poet Ogden Nash wrote in pithy summation of
the humble goldfish, whose habitat is, by tradition, a glass bowl
anchored by the faux luxury of a gravel-bound ceramic castle. But the
reality is more complex, suggests a new book by Anna Marie Roos, a
professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of
Lincoln, in England.
In Goldfish,
Roos fleshes out the cultural history of this seemingly ho-hum fish,
painting it as both common and exotic, scientific research hero and
environmental villain, and biogeographic success story. National
Geographic spoke by phone with Roos about the fish more formally known as Carassius auratus.
As a science historian, you’ve written about esoteric subjects like 17th century mollusk expert Martin Lister. Goldfish seem comparatively banal. I gather there’s a personal backstory.
© Photograph by Grassyfork Fisheries, Nat Geo Image Collection Grassyfork Fisheries, pictured here, is believed to be the first goldfish hatchery in the U.S., established in 1899 in Indiana. |
I had a pet goldfish named Speedy. I was a geeky scientist at a young
age and out of curiosity, touched him. He had really rough scales, so I
poured hand lotion in the water to make his scales soft...
So much for Speedy.
Yes. In part, I wrote the book out of guilt for Speedy.
Where do goldfish fit into the animal kingdom?
Goldfish
are basically carp. The Chinese originally bred them to eat. Carp,
which are normally grey or green, breed like crazy, and you get
variations of colors and shapes. Nature plays around. They have a
smattering of pigment cells that are red or gold. A mutation would have
suppressed the grey pigment cells, allowing the yellow and red ones to
be expressed. Humans took a mutation and made a species of them.
In China, the golden fish takes on religious overtones.
In
about the ninth century, goldfish mutants, when captured by fishermen,
were not eaten and [instead] released into Buddhist ponds of mercy in an
act of fang sheng, or mercy release. The monks fed and kept them, so
the fish were protected by not being in the open waters. Releasing an
animal into such a pond of mercy was an act of self-purification, a good
deed in the Buddhist religion, which becomes even better if the animal
is rare, like a goldfish versus a common carp.
Let’s follow in their wake as they circulate around the world. We start with China...
They
are domesticated in China more than a thousand years ago and come to
Japan around the late 16th century. They go to Europe and beyond as a
pet and living ornament for aquaria and fountains via Macao. The first
drawing of goldfish in England is by botanist James Petiver in 1711. By
the 19th century, they are in the States and mentioned in 1817 in
Webster’s Dictionary.
Losing their mystique and exoticism along the way, no doubt. At one time, you write, the United States government gave them away.
In
a publicity stunt, from 1884 to 1894, if you were a resident of
Baltimore or Washington, D.C, and wrote your congressman, the U.S.
Commission of Fish and Fisheries [today the National Marine Fisheries
Service] would send you goldfish. Some 20,000 were given away each year
before the program was discontinued.
Other suppliers took up the slack.
By the turn of the century, the Midwest had huge goldfish farms. Grassyfork Fishery in Indiana produced two million a year. Grassyfork was even a tourist attraction.
They also have a starring role in more than 40,000 scientific papers. What makes them a good subject for experiments?
One
reason is that they are good at absorbing substances, so they are used
in toxicity studies. In the 19th century, for example, they were used to
study digitalis dosing. They can regenerate their optic nerve, so
they’re of interest in vision studies. Also, they have pretty good
memories, and that makes them useful in psychology studies. Their
sensitivity to sunlight makes them valuable for looking at skin cancer.
They are a good animal model because they breed easily and are cheap.
There was a brief goldfish-swallowing fad. What prompted that?
Officially,
it started in April 1939, when a Harvard freshman swallowed one on a
dare. It largely died out later that year with World War II, as there
were other things to think about. Any animal rights activist would be
appalled. Animals are not meant for our entertainment. In 2012, a young
girl in the United Kingdom was so disturbed about the custom of giving
them away as fairground prizes, she started an online petition. In
England and Wales, it’s now an offense to give a goldfish as a prize to a
minor.
Tell us about their troublesome side—goldfish as environmental villains.
Because
they’re carp, they’re bottom-feeders and omnivores. They stir up the
bottom of a pond or lake in search of prey, making the water turbid and
likely to encourage algal growth. Because they are adaptable and can
live in a wider range of water temperatures, they outcompete native
species. In a head-to-head contest, trout will starve, goldfish will
live. That’s what happens when, say, a fisherman uses goldfish as bait,
dumps them in a lake, and drives home. They breed and get big. So you
get huge goldfish, like the foot-and-a-half one pulled out of Lake Tahoe. In 2015, 3,000 goldfish took over Teller Lake
in Boulder, Colorado. The fisheries commission was ready to
electro-shock the lake to get them out, when a big flock of white
pelicans flew over and picked them off one by one.
Divine intervention? But you can’t always count on a flock of pelicans to show up...
The
fish has been listed as a nuisance in Colorado, Nevada, New York, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon. In Alberta, Canada, they have mounted a
"Don’t Let It Loose Campaign" and made it an offense to release them.
So we might say that the book, in line with Buddhist principles, represents your act of purification for Speedy. Do you think he’s been vindicated?
Yes. How many goldfish do you know that have a
book dedicated to them? If anything, I hope it makes people think about
how we use animals as disposable commodities and the assumptions we make
about their intelligence. Animals are not put here exclusively for
human use.