Specially trained attack medaka
Update: This morning not a single mosquito larva was observed in either pot. Not one. My pretties appear to have devoured every last wriggler during the night. There was a single young mosquito which had managed to emerge from the water. It was pale and not yet quite its adult form and clinging to the inside of the pot just above the waterline. I let it live. It is the last of its kind. I fed the fish tonight a little krill meal as a special treat.
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I’m trying to grow a lotus in a pot on the concrete stoop in front of my room. I’m not having much luck, but perhaps it’s just taking its time getting settled.
I am having terrific luck breeding mosquitos, though, and the pot teems with wrigglers great and small. So today I introduced predatory fish, medaka, to feast upon the larvae. They’ve only been in there a couple of hours but have gone to it with great gusto. I put 7 of them in the lotus pot and 3 in a pot in which my wife is growing some sort of other water lilly (with somewhat more success, damn it) and which is also a-wriggle. You get 10 fish for ¥400.
I’m hoping at this point for future generations of specially trained attack medaka.
I noticed they seem to go after the larvae that give them a bit of a chase, ignoring the easy ones right in front of them. They’re sporting about it, and not unaware of the thrill of the hunt, bless their carnivorous little souls. I hope they prosper and multiply (within balance).
In The Ecology of Eden Evan Eisenberg mentions the importance of having a garden, even if it’s only a plant in a pot on a windowsill, in order to have something to take care of, some other living thing on which you must attend. I’m hoping for a little ecosystem out the front there, with fish fattening on mosquito wrigglers, their pooh nourishing lotus blossoms, friendly organisms, a nitrogen cycle, births, deaths.
And then there’s the aesthetic pleasure, tinged a little morbidly with the eternal struggle, of seeing the surface of the water churn when one of the fish takes a strike.
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Posted to General Rants • 2006.08.13 (Sun) • 17:42
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