** Click here for Episode 169 **
Hooray! For once we got something right, according to Paul:
I have an utterly useless qualification in fish biology and once spend 3 pointless weeks working for a goldfish producer. Your advice to the student who wanted to start his own fish finger farm was spot on for numerous practical reasons let alone the moral ones.
Firstly, the odds of finding both a male and female goldfish unless you are skilled in goldfish physiology are remote to say the very least. Plus the only way to sex them involves a complicated surgical procedure which the goldfish has almost no chance of surviving.
Even if you did find a pair, then they would never breed in a tank. Goldfish know when to get “horny” by the hours of daylight (this is called photoperiodism) and as their light is controlled by their owner, they would never even experience the goldfish equivalent of mild arousal. Plus they like shallow warm water with lots of plants to leave their eggs on to breed.
Finally, if by some kind of miracle they do manage “the dance of many fins”, then you would need to produce a supply of tiny crustaceans to feed their offspring. Plus you’d need to separate them from their parents so that they don’t succumb to that most disturbing of goldfish behaviour, cannibalism!
Bad news for you, James from Aberystwyth – your scheme will certainly not keep you in an endlessly renewed supply of fishfingers. Try offering yourself as a concubine to Captain Birdseye instead.
David Beckham's rich, he doesn't even need to grow his own
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