Evening Star Newspaper, August 8, 1937, Page 75

Avgust 8, 1937 Men risk lives and fortunes to find the vivid little creatures that grace your parlor fish bowl by WiLLIAM BRIDGES THIS WEEK CHLLION DOLLAR MITES A DEMON FISH: HE'S TINY, BUT LOOKS THE PART WHAT! NO FISH FOOD? THREE TINY FELLOWS WAITING FOR THEIR DINNER RIGHT — NOT A MONSTER, BUT A TINY PLECOSTOMID UNDER A MAG- NIFYING LENS BELOW—PARADISE FISH. THE CRAZE FOR “TOY" FISH BEGANWITH THEM RIGHT: LIKE EELS WITH A NON-SKID TREAD ARE THESE CALAMICHTHYS STREAMLINED: THE SORUBIM LIMA HE chances are one in ten that you, the reader of this article, keep a bowl of goldfish in your living Toom. Or, if you've advanced beyond that ama- teur stage, a tank of “tropicals.” For the “toy” fish business is really Big Business today, involving millions of dollars, and has gotten that way because there’s a fish fancier in one home out of every ten in America. Ocean liners are plowing the seas at this moment with thousands upon thousands of tropical fish aboard, protected and guarded by all the way from $10,000 to $500,000 worth of equipment. And every single fish is getting as much service and attention as the most crotchety first class passenger. More atten- tion — because if the occupant of the de luxe cabin on “A” deck gets seasick, they won't stop the ship and take him off to rest. But they’ll take the weary, seasick fish ashore and give them a vacation from the rolling waves. It’s no joke. Fish do get seasick, and they are set ashore to recuperate. It all began about sixty years ago when a French army officer returned to Paris after long duty in China and carried with him a small collection of brilliantly colored paradise fish. China had been breeding them for thou- sands of years, but they were a novelty in Europe, and caused a sensation. Interest in them picked up in the United States shortly before the World War, lapsed, and finally took off like a skyrocket in the early ’thirties. Maybe it was caused by, or maybe it was the result of, the establishment in New York of an agency for a big German firm of fish dealers, for tropicals have been popular in Germany for years. At any rate, two rival fish collecting and distributing agencies entered the field with the German concern, and today no fish can swim far enough or spawn in a jungle deep enough to elude the field collectors of the fish dealers. They go everywhere. I wandered one day into Christopher W. Coates’ tropical fish laboratory in the New York Aquarium and collided with a polite little man who was run- ning to catch a boat to British Guiana. He was going into the interior, three weeks be- yond the point where the maps frazzled out. - After fish. When I saw him almost a year later =, AN ANGEL FISH, PRIDE OF MANY AN AQUARIUM HE SPORTS HEAD AND TAIL LIGHTS LY he had been to Borneo and the Congo in the . interim, and he was leaving next day for Siam. Noanimal dealer, with all the great zoological parks of Europe and the United States as his potential customers, sends out such expedi- tions or maintains- such establishments as those of the two or three largest dealers in pet fishes. They never did and they never could, although, specimen for specimen, the animal dealers bring back the more valuable stock. No single tropical fish ever did or ever will bring $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 — the prices that have been paid for animal rarities. But many a tropical fish an inch or so long has brought $5, $10 or $25, and many a collector has carried ten thousand fish out of the jungle. There was the Neon Tetra. 3 In the spring of 1936 a certain M. Rabaut rolled into Paris with a number of the low, flat cans that have been developed for fish shipments. Not long afterward the “fish world”” was electrified to learn that the deep jungles of the Amazon basin had spawned a sensation —a tiny fish with a red streak along its side; a streak that glowed exactly like a neon light. The Neon Tetra, they called it, Tetra being the generic name of the group to which it be- longed. Sixspecimens crossed the ocean aboard the dirigible Hindenburg (five of them dying before they got to their midwest destina- tion). Newspapers carried stories about the astonishing fish with a neon light in its skin. Presently plenty of specimens reached the market from Paris. Prices fluctuated between burlesque limits — all the way from $1.89 to $100 a pair. Thousands were sold. Flurries like that are rare in the fish busi- ness, but it all helps to make Big Business. And every oollector dreams of dipping up some fish equally capable of turning the market upside down. Sooner or later, if more sensations of the caliber of the Neon Tetra are to be found in tropical fresh waters, some collector will dip them up, too. One New York dealer maintains a regular schedule of ex- peditions to parts of South America where no other white men go. It’s adventurous business, but there is no romance in it. Just hard work — the danger (Continved on page 15) LEFT: A YOUNG ASTRONOTUS