In essence, a carton is just a liquid container, a box which has liquid in, as is a fish tank.
For my project I intend to interpret the word carton in this way, as one of my main hobbies before I came to university was tropical fish keeping. I use the word keeping because, contrary to popular belief, they are in fact fairly difficult to keep alive, and there’s more to it than simply sticking a goldfish in a glass mixing bowl with a plastic castle.
I think the general idea about keeping fish as from people who’ve never done it is that having fish is the easy way out of having a pet, you don’t have to take a fish for 2 walks a day, you don’t have to take a fish to the vet, you don’t have to pick up it’s faeces etc etc. All of these points, whilst immediately seem true, are incorrect to. If you notice your fish isn’t well, you go to the pet shop with a water sample so they can assess the water and give you the appropriate advice or sell you the appropriate products to make the fish better. When they tank is being cleaned, what exactly do people think is being cleaned out of it? Fish need their space, if you have too many in a tank they can’t exercise properly, like a dog being locked in a bathroom.
I did my work experience in year 10 in the aquatics department of a garden centre, and I know for a fact that people don’t consider anything like this when considering setting up tanks, and even most people who had tanks knew less about it than I did even as a year 10, something which I found astonishing.
Because of all this, my project will be based around the knowledge and difficulties of keeping tropical fish, something which I think that people may find relatively surprising and interesting when reviewing my work in crits. It is a subject that I’m able to enjoyably research and have a strong background knowledge on, so it make sense.
Problems I Will Be Looking At:
pH - If the pH balance of the water isn’t right, the wish can’t breather and so will die. Most filters use biological bacteria to clean the tank, and these bacteria need a slightly different pH to survive, so balancing the waters pH is very important and difficult.
Ammonia (Poison) - If the filter stops working for whatever reason, the water in the tank quickly becomes poisonous and the fish die.
Feeding - Too little food and the fish will starve/eat each other. Too much and the food will rot in the bottom of the tank and cause ammonia.
Cannibalism - It’s not as easy as picking a pretty fish from a shop, some aren’t compatible with others.
Lighting - The health of most tropical fish will deteriorate quickly if they don’t get between 8 and 10 hours of light a day.
Expense - A tropical fish tank requires a heater and a filter to be running on mains electricity 24/7, and a light to be running at least 8 hours a day. Then aesthetic things like bubblers also require a plug 24/7.
Cleaning - The tank needs cleaning at least ones a month otherwise algae grows on the tank walls and the filters become saturated with the bad bacteria taken from the tank to the point where they can no longer function.
Jumping - Certain species of fish jump a lot, and so if there’s no lid on the tank you can easily wake up one morning to find a fish beached on the carpet dead. Even if the tank does have a lid, it needs to be removed for cleaning.
Pet Shops - Tropical fish are bred in such huge quantities that their health is of no importance to the breeders, so there’s never a guarantee that you’re buying a healthy pet.
Transport - After you've paid for the fish it gets given to you in a little plastic bag with some water from the tank it was in in the shop. Transferring the fish from this bag into your tank can be very stressful for and the fish and just a difficult task in general to due the other fish in the tank being inquisitive as to what's going on, and often the new fish is very tentative about leaving it's bag.
How I Will Be Researching The Problems:
The various problems will naturally have varying methods of research.
- pH, Ammonia and Lighting will most likely be book and internet based research due to the scientific nature of the problems.
- Feeding, Cannibalism and Jumping will more than likely involve me speaking to people at various fish shops and gathering information on how to avoid it.
- Expense might involve calculations as to how much a tank costs to run and comparisons to what else this money could be used for.
- Cleaning and Transport is a case of documentation as much as anything. There's only so many ways to possibly clean a fish tank and force a fish out of its transport bag.
- Pet Shops could be a difficult one, because short of stooping around the backs of their shops their isn't really much I can do other than draw comparisons between their fish and and fish at specifically fish shops, and draw conclusions based on this.
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