FIsh Farm

Well, here I am in Thailand, writing a blog to save and post later on as fast as I can, as my computer’s unrechargable until I can find a plug converter) battery slowly drains away. It currently has 20% power left…. Which gives me? A half an hour? Probably more…. We’ll see.

Blahhhh… soo much to write about.not enough time. Lets see if I can get it all down.

We went on a field trip to a tilapia fish farm the other day, where, instead of merely looking at the fish ponds and dully taking pictures of them, we actually helped farm the fish. The entire process and ideas behind the practice were really interesting.

It felt exactly like an episode on dirty jobs. I spent the day hip deep in muddy tilapia ponds, giggling with excitement as I helped drag nets across some very murky water to help gather fish. You do this systematically— lined in a row, helping drag a net that spans the length of the entire fish pond across the bottom of the pool . This way, you are able to collect as many fish as you can with out leaving  room for escape.

 The water in the ponds is about as deep as your hip, but when you’re helping drag a net, you crouch till its up to your neck. Your hands hold a lead wire, and you do your best to scrape it across the bottom of the pond. By the time you’ve reached the end of the lake, the net is vibrating with tilapia that are struggling to escape. They unexpectedly will leap out of the water, hoping to leap out of the net that’s surrounded them. At one point in time, a fish swam up my leg and leaped into my arm pit. I squealed, along with the people around me.
At the end of the lake, you lift your arms up from the water. All the girls arms look  awkwardly manly there is sludge that has stuck to your arm hair. A million fine little hairs, all stained black all over. I never realized that I had hair on my fingers until the other day.
None of the fish that I gathered in the net that day were ready to be eaten. They weren’t big enough. Instead, we merely transferred the fish we caught in to another pool, where they would have enough space to grow until they were large enough to eat. 
The main idea behind the fish farm revolves around maintaining the populations of fish inside the various ponds, so the fish are able to grow to a size big enough to sell for a decent amount of money. By sweeping the nets across the lake and gathering we were able to control the fish population in the lake to keep the area under control. We were also able to preserve the pond we had; if too many tilapia stayed in it, they would ultimately eat away all the resources until the pond was leached of its nutrients.
Other types of fish live in the pond as well, to help maintain a healthy ecosystem with in it. There were karp. Huge Karp. They were beautiful. For all you art nerds reading this out there- a combonation of deep and bright cadmium yellows, mixed with a little bit of ochre on the edges of the scales. Exactly like a giant, fat luminescent, goldfish. One of them was filled with eggs. She looked like a globe with gills and a head.

Also harvested fish eggs. You catch fish, and pry open their mouths. If they have eggs- they will barf –(seriously – they really barf it) up oodles of these tiny little yellow dots (Color: light cadmium yellow, white, and maybe a pinch of ochre and ultramarine blue to make it look a little brownish green in the shadowed sections) all over the place. When your fish starts to puke, you hold it over a net, and collect the eggs as quick as you can. Ted found a fish that puked. I was jealous. I myself, had enough trouble merely figuring out how to hold them properly before they slipped away from my hands.