Gold fish ..... pet ? ~ finding levels of alcoholism !!

Have you ever raised fish ? - Gold fish in a small round bowl looks pretty  pleasing to eyes! ~ Some species of Gold fish and koi are amongst the most common pets of modern aquarium.  Gold fish exist in a far wider range of colours than the name implies. It is considered one of the earliest domesticated fish.  Goldfish have long been popular pets in the UK and an estimated 12million fish are kept indoors, with a further 18million in ponds across the country. A casual search on web provided so many facts [source BBC Science] including that they were originally kept for meat and something on ‘alcohol test!’.

It is stated that goldfish didn't start out as a pet. It was dinner. Modern goldfish (Carassius auratus auratus) are a domesticated version of a wild carp from east Asia. Their wild ancestor was silver-grey. Known as "chi", it was at one time the most common fish eaten in China. Every so often, a genetic mishap would produce a fish that was a brilliant red, yellow, or orange. In the wild, such fish stood out and were gobbled up quickly by predators. But in the ninth century Chinese people – mainly Buddhist monks – began to keep chi in ponds, where they were safe from predators. According to legend, Governor Ting Yen-tsan discovered both golden and yellow chi in a pond outside the city of Jiaxing. The pond then became a "pond of mercy".

The domesticated goldfish when released in wild could not survive as it was tame.  A few centuries ago, keeping goldfish on bowls became a fashion.  The ensuing frenzy of artificial breeding produced  hundreds of  varieties of goldfish we see today.  While the different goldfish breeds have features that "satisfied human preference and curiosity", their ornate tail fins are "fancy but uncontrollable" and their bodies are "unfittingly fat", according to a 2009 paper of the Tokai University School of Medicine in Isehara, Japan.  

Goldfish according to BBC Science are one of the most studied animals in the field of visual perception and cognition. They can perceive the same colours we do, which not even all primates can do, making them an ideal study animal. Goldfish are also particularly useful for understanding the effects of alcohol on the brain and body. That's because "the concentration of alcohol in their blood rapidly approximates the concentration of alcohol in the water in which they swim", according to Donald Goodwin of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri and his colleagues in 1971. That means you can gauge the inebriation of a goldfish non-invasively, just by knowing how much alcohol is in their fishbowl.  In 1969 Ralph Ryback of Boston City Hospital in Massachusetts used that fact to see how different kinds of alcohol affected goldfishes’ ability to learn. It turns out fish swimming in a bourbon solution are more impaired than those splashing around in vodka. So now you know. !!

There is a ‘Goldfish case’ too – it began with a few dead goldfish, and the bags of heroin sewn inside them, that were shipped from China and intercepted in San Francisco in 1988 by agents of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration. It was supposed to be a cornerstone of cooperation between drug enforcement agencies in China and the United States, with the Chinese authorities sending a captured drug smuggler to testify for the prosecution at an American trial for the first time.

Then the witness,  asked for political asylum. Now "the goldfish case," as it is known among law-enforcement officials, has brought joint drug enforcement efforts to a standstill at a time when China is a major conduit for heroin bound for the United States. The events have also cast a pall over other Chinese-American criminal justice and diplomatic ventures. Perhaps the ‘goldfish’ case is now felt to be pain in the neck.  The Chinese say Mr. Wang, a native of Shanghai, must be returned before cooperation on drug enforcement can improve.  They say that the culprit should be dealt with properly and extradited to China to face charges. But a Federal judge has ordered that Mr. Wang not be deported because American officials violated his constitutional rights !

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

26^th Nov. 2014.