When you live in a house full of animals, leaving for vacation involves much more than just packing, requesting vacation weeks, etc. I went to Maui week before last. I recruited my mother to take care of my fishies while I was gone. The basic "care" of these guys isn't a huge deal (to me...); feed them a teenie bit twice a day, add conditioned water if it gets too low, turn the lights on and off. Even so, I typed up a pretty detailed schedule of feeding and lighting for my mom, which I kind of regret because I think that made it harder than it really should have been. Oops. She also told me that she felt bad for the fish, and that they seemed depressed, having nothing to do. I assured her that they were probably bored because I wasn't there to train them (I was a little unsure about this, and I thought about the ethics of fish-keeping again).
I got home from my vacation, and after snuggling the furry guys (Gus and Rusty), I checked on the fish. Dumbledore was quite excited to see me, and darted all over the place. His 2 catfish were hiding, but came out when they saw me. Paro was equally happy to see me.
I have been neglecting my fish training for a while, since the death of one of the catfish. Notice, I said "his 2 catfish". I tried twice to write a blog about it, but KPCT ate it :/
It was very sudden, about 2 weeks after the little guys joined to tank. There wasn't any violence...so it wasn't a murder thankfully. I think he probably just wasn't healthy to begin with. The other 3 catfish are fine, and are actually growing a bit and aren't sooo tiny now. Dory gets along beautifully with his pair, and Paro really enjoys having a buddy to follow around. I'll have to write about Paro's new range of behaviors in another blog. He is soo funny.
I got back yesterday morning, after 1.5 days of travel, and I decided to not work with the fish any, after noticing that Mom had perhaps been overfeeding (lots of food debris on the gravel). This morning I dutifully got out my flashlight and my new hoops. The hoops are made out of bendy drinking straws and air line tubing (maybe I will make an instructional video of this....). Dory had a bit of practice with the hoop, and when I put it in the water, he went through it quickly. C/t. He seemed sooo excited that we were playing the clicker game. He immediately decided to play his game of "What can I do to get the click??". Go under the hoop? Rest on top of it? Hmm...Hover in front of it and then curve away? Silly betta :) I got 3 more reps of actually going through the hoop from left to right.
They DO NOT generalize AT ALL. He assumes (??) that if he gets clicked for going L-R through to hoop that going R-L will not work, and oddly enough, he will not try it. He will go L-R through the hoop, and then deliberately arch back around and approach the hoop the same way.I'm thinking of having a series of hoops, and training a different direction to each one...so, he would do a sort of figure eight/serpentine. I suppose each hoop would have to look markedly different, not just different colors, and individually shape the hoop behavior to each hoop. Maybe I can somehow have round hoops and square hoops. Maybe even triangles. I have not idea if that would work, if he could identify the differences or not. It's very hard to tell how much he can see. He seems to turn his head to see things a lot, so maybe he has a line of vision similar to a horse. I dunno.
Anyhow, I have lots of pictures of these guys that I haven't uploaded and I will do that sometime.
Also, when I was in Maui, I visited the Aquarium. I spent a lot of time observing an octopus there. When I first went through the exhibit, it was very crowded and noisy. He was hunkered down on the bottom of his tank, the color of his substrate and looked as though he was breathing hard. I went through the exhibit again about 40 minutes later and the place was about to close, so I was the only one in there. He was bright white (beautiful!) and zooming around his tank gracefully, now that no one but me was watching. I thought it was interesting how sensitive he was. I took a picture of him with my cell phone the first time I saw him and then a series of 15 second videos when he was active...if I knew how, I would upload them here but I do not. Anyone have a clue about this?
Will write more later....
