Weird, Wild Shrimp

Bamboo Shrimp Feeding from Matthew Stinson on Vimeo.

Comings and Goings

Most of the time I go to a nearby pet market in downtown to buy pets and aquarium supplies, but of late I've started considering Taobao -- the Chinese eBay -- as a shopping option.  Now, I don't think Taobao is a wise choice if buying a high-end pet.  If I was going to get another chinchilla, for example, I'd go to a local dealer instead.  But for supplies and pets it seems like a good choice.

The point of this exposition is that I found a nice Taobao dealer here in Tianjin and ordered a smattering of shrimps and plants and picked them up in-person across town.  He has some very cheap red cherry shrimp and some very cool bamboo shrimp, which are a pricey ($2.00 a pop) and rare item.

Now back to that pet market.  My girlfriend and I bought a female hamster to replace the one we lost, and we did a kind of stupid thing -- we didn't pay attention to the seller as she grabbed it and tossed it in the box.  We ended up with a bum hamster.  She was a poor little thing, with both of her ears nicked and hair missing from her nose and neck.  Once it got home it closed its eyes and sat in one corner of the cage, not interacting with the male.  I took it back the next day and the seller -- who, n.b., we've bought from for nearly a year -- insisted it the hamster was hurt by our hamster (yet these open wounds miraculously healed overnight!) and refused to exchange it, offering me a separate cage to keep it in instead.  I wound up buying a new hamster and crossing the shop off my "frequent visit" list -- another win for Taobao I suppose.

When we picked up that hamster we also bought a cute-ugly (cugly!) freshwater aquatic turtle, who, at adult size, could easily fit into a closed hand.  I have a number of tanks it could be kept in, but my girlfriend decided after advising the laoban (store owner) that the turtle would be just fine and dandy in my crayfish tank.  This was a mistake.  The crays terrorized the turtle for one day, with the final act being a darkly comic scene of a crayfish "flying" through the water holding the turtle from behind by its front legs.  The turtle was not amused.  He promptly died the next day upon relocation to a cray-free environment.  Thus always to turtles.

Aside from serving as a Taobao evangelist, this week's main project has been to teardown both of my fighting fish nanotanks and replace the HOB filters with UGFs and Volcamia shrimp sand.  The end result is a couple of much cleaner, quieter tanks, but also too much current for my older fighting fish, Dazi, to take.  The young white one I have, Diamond, seems to have adapted well, but all the environmental stresses may push the other one into early "retirement."  Problem is, finding a filter head smaller than 5W to use on the UGF.  No can do here in Tianjin.  Still, I'm getting faster with aquarium teardowns and rebuilds and hope to follow-up on this work with a renovation of the cray tank, which gets diatomlicious in no time.

Coming soon -- a video of that bamboo shrimp doing his bamboo shrimp kung fu. 

July Is the Cruelest Month

For some reason known only to God and/or the universe, the creation of this blog coincided with the death of several pets.

Several of the fish in my 60L tank died in rapid succession this week, including two forktail rainbowfish and one of my cory cats. After the "plague" hit, one of my neon tetras turned gray and swelled up, balloon-like. I've isolated it in a hospital tank but I'm afraid the whole lot of fish have gotten so-called "neon tetra disease" or something similar.  Their shrimp tankmates seem unaffected.

Besides the fish casualties, one of the Roborovskii hamsters my girlfriend was raising -- a female -- died of something that looked like "wet tail," but the amount of information about "Robo hamsters" and their diseases are pretty sparse even on today's Wikipediafied Internets.  We're observing the male to see if he stays healthy, but he seems pretty down without his girlfriend to play with.

A Hobby in Search of a Blog

I've been blogging off-and-on for 9 years, and most of my writing online has focused on the expat experience in China, the US political scene as well as international politics, and some day to day musings.  I haven't left a lot of room thematically for all of my hobbies, however.  This is probably because readers expecting posts and Tweets that slice and dice Chinese economic news or pinpoint a president's successes and failures aren't likely to enjoy a sudden foray into discussing barbecue rubs or camera filters.

But my hobbies are still important to me and they do tie in, in part, to the Florida Cracker-in-Mao Zedong's Court experience.  Enter this blog, which will look at one of those hobbies -- raising various kinds of pets as a foreigner in a Chinese city.  In the US, keeping pets is a bit of a no-brainer: you do some research, go to the mall or find a dealer online, and bring your pet home in short order.  China, on the other hand, presents a set of unique challenges to the pet owner, including:

• The language barrier.  Raising pets is not a focus of most Chinese language study books nor is it the kind of thing students will consider in their HSK prep.  This is kind of a shame, because for most expats, keeping a pet is a good way to fight homesickness and make our often-spartan apartments seem more "lived in."  Like other hobbies here, finding and caring for a pet requires a willingness to learn language as you go along.  Remember the first time you walked into a restaurant in a foreign country and pointed to dishes and asked what they were called to learn the language?  That's what I do when I go pet shopping.
• Animal health.  We often talk about the Chinese health care system having disadvantages, but the animal health care system is arguably worse.  On the front end, many animals are sold to their new owners with life-threatening diseases and conditions, resulting in either immediate death or lengthy, sometimes expensive, medical care and possible recovery or a delayed death.  But even if you're lucky and your pet is okay today it may have trouble tomorrow.  While animal hospitals have started to appear throughout first- and second-tier Chinese cities, most vets specialize in dogs and cats and have little knowledge about exotics, leaving many buyers at the mercy of the pet store owner.  If you take things into your own hands and do the research, home treatment is possible but also problematic, owing to the next challenge ...
• Supply.  The Chinese pet market is developing as an offshoot of the rise of the Chinese middle class.  The more money and more time and less children -- thanks to that pesky One-Child Policy -- that Chinese people have, the more they are willing to turn to pets for entertainment and company.  Now, it should be noted that Chinese have been keeping small dogs and goldfish for thousands of years, but the last two decades have seen a remarkable diversity in the kinds of pets Chinese can choose.  And yet many of these pets are sold without good enclosures or the correct dietary products available in the market, not to mention proper medicines!  Beyond that, the high demand and low availability of certain pets means that Chinese -- and expats in China -- must pay a premium for all but the most common forms of dogs, cats, birds, and fish.

At first glance it might seem like I'm down on the idea of keeping pets in China.  Not at all.  I'm simply mindful of the kinds of difficulties that one will face when investing anywhere from a handful to thousands of RMB in a pet in China.  I'm not a hardcore pet buyer -- I save most of my money for photography gear -- but I've invested a few thousand over the years, so I'm always on the lookout for ways to protect my investment, er, pets, and find new scaly, furry, or fine-feathered friends to acquire and care for.

With this front matter out of the way, let me talk briefly about why I've started Critters at an Exhibition.  The twin functions of this blog will be to serve as a guide to raising pets in China and as a pet diary of sorts.  Here's a little backgrounder on the kind of animals I'm raising now as well as their facilities (note that my hobby is heavily slanted towards fishkeeping):

• Two 2-gallon betta tanks with HOB filters and a few snails and shrimp to clean up the place.
• One 10-gallon crayfish tank with a small school of tiger barbs, a pleco, a mix of large snails and some shrimp to keep the crays company.
• One 20-gallon tropical fish and shrimp tank with about ten small tropical fish, a few nerite and mystery snails, a small colony of red cherry shrimp, some Amanos, and a dwarf crayfish.  This tank formerly housed a colony of crystal red shrimp but they were pretty much annihilated by the summer heat.
• A 3 gallon nursery tank with 30 or so baby crayfish who are rapidly growing -- and feeding on each other.  Yikes.
• A small turtle tank with two young yellow-eared sliders.
• A pair of hamsters experimented on cared for by my girlfriend.
• And, lastly, a six-month old male chinchilla named Mao Mao ("Furry" in Chinese), who is as cute as he is unsociable.