I’ve been doing more work with the creek aquarium. For instance, it now has LED lighting.
Yeah, I know, I couldn’t make a ham sandwich without giving it LED lighting. It’s just my thing I guess.
The super-clever pump and filter apparatus that I invented continues to give me nothing but trouble. And there’s some weird worms, probably planaria, that plaster the glass.
But this afternoon, with co-editor Steve and his family in tow, we went down to Waller Creek near the UT to expand my aquarium’s population of native minnow species.
Several of the minnows that we caught, are apparently the common mosquitofish, which has been introduced to innumerable countries around the world (ostensibly to control the mosquito populations).
In other words, although it is a native, it’s simply the dullest fish imaginable.
The other fish, the one that I’m most impressed with, is also the fish that gave me the idea to go down this whole path in the first place. I was standing on a pedestrian bridge over Waller Creek, across a parking lot from MLK, when I caught sight of pink fins rippling among a school of minnows. I thought, why get all these fish from other countries, when there are perfectly beautiful fish right here in the creeks?
Today, working in tandem with young master Wilson, we managed to catch one of these elusive and colorful minnows.
With a specimen in my possession, I scoured the web for its classification.
At the bottom of this page belonging to the Waller Creek society, you can see its picture.
As it turns out, it’s not actually a native minnow. It’s a variable platy, an invasive aquarium fish native to Mexico.
(At first I thought that the moquitofish were females herded by the platys, but although they are both of the family Poeciliidae, they’re not really related.)
So, no. My initial thesis of "native fish are just as good" doesn’t hold up to field testing. Although I’m impressed that a fragile tropical fish, similar to the dozens and dozens of doomed aquarium fish I bought as a kid, would have an invasive range stretching through the entire creek.
While digging through google image searches, I found this abandoned blog by a local who built a similar Austin creek ecosystem in a loft apartment. You will notice that his profile picture has about a dozen variable platys.
According to this guy, Shoal Creek, a short jaunt from Waller Creek, contains a bunch of Texas Cichlids, which are both a native species and a respected aquarium fish.
So an exploration of Shoal Creek is next on the agenda.
