Charles Darwin would be fucking ashamed...

If you are reading this, let me officially welcome you to my blog!  I'd like to kick this thing off with two stories about fish, both of which relate to the topic of evolution in one way or the other, and both of which are quite informative as to just who I am as a person.

At roughly the same time in my life when I drew the picture above, I was pretty into my aquarium. It started with a goldfish in a one gallon wine jug, which my then-roomates and I had unceremoniously consumed the night before in a fit of wild college abandon, and progressed through several iterations of 5, 10, and 20 gallon synthetic aquatic ecosystems until, last week, I finally chucked the last one out the front door in a fit of wild grown-up abandon, washing my hands of the whole thing. None of that is important to the story.

One day in the boom of my fish hobbyism, my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I were in one of the local pet stores, probably buying some relatively cheap, showy fish to throw in the tank to replace some other relatively cheap, showy fish that had died because it was too fucking inbred to live any longer.  As we consider our options, we hear a conversation take place between the pet store fish person and another college student who also happens to be in the market for cheap, showy fish to trick out his killer new tenement in one of the local frat houses that are so popular with the willfully retarded.

For anyone who doesn't know, salt water hobby fish are much prettier.  Yellow tangs 'n' shit - really vibrant, beautiful colors like you'd expect to find swimming around a coral reef.  However, it doesn't take a genius to know that salt water fish don't belong in freshwater any more than salt water fish belong on dry land, and this dude keeps pressing the poor woman doomed to suffer this buffoonery as to why, exactly, he can't just buy these salt water fish and throw them into the freshwater fish tank.

"I mean, won't they just, like, evolve, and be able to deal with it?"  At this point I wanted to shove this kid into a tank of sharks to see if he might evolve to be able to deal with that.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to say whose to blame - this kid himself, his parents, his high school biology teacher, or this god person I keep hearing so much about - but one thing is absolutely certain: Charles Darwin would be fucking ashamed...

My second story takes place years later.  At this point I am out of college and working in a lab (studying evolutionary biology, incidentally) and am charged with cleaning out the lab fish tank.  Naturally, when the lab that studies the evolution of water lilies needs a guy to take care of the breeding tank, they pick they guy who does this stuff at home too.  Every month or so, I would devote nearly a half work day to cleaning out these tanks one at a time - big 250 gallon affairs with set of industrial grow bulbs pieced together haphazardly by some grad student a couple years before.  When you have to fill one of these fuckers from the sink, which only gives you a couple gallons of water per minute, it takes a looooooooong time.  On this day, however, one of my best good friends from the lab was giving his exit talk about his dissertation - the last in a long line of stepping stones and flaming hoops you must navigate before being given a Ph.D.  It was celebration time, and being as easily distracted as I am, I pretty much hooked up the refill hose, turned the water on, and went out drinking with the guys to celebrate my buddy's doctorate.

At 10am the next morning, a Saturday, I get a call from one of my lab mates.  And rightfully so.  If you do the math, at several gallons per minute for roughly 16 hours (or 960 minutes), we're looking at a couple thousand gallons of water NOT in the fish tank where it's supposed to be, but all over the lab floor.  So I got to spend my Saturday mopping up that mess, which was completely deserved, but also completely shitty.

What the fuck?  I thought this was going to be a story about evolution, and fish, and shit like like that?

Here's the connection.  The breeding tanks each held a small population of guppies - the showy, inbred kind you'd buy at a fish store - bought because they eat the little insect larvae that try to make their home in the tanks.  When the tanks overflowed, so did the fish, and they spend much of the next 16 hours swimming around in an inch of water on the floor.  And because guppies breed like crazy, there were guppies at all stages of life swimming on the floor of the lab.  Now, I'm a big softy, so I decided to rescue as many of these little fish as I could, but as you might imagine many of them had died in the dirty floor ocean, and many others died when I tossed them back into what turned out to be an electrified tank of water, owing to the fact that the industrial lighting fixture's mass of tangled wires were now hanging into the tank.  It gave me quite a shock, so I can't imagine that it did very good things for the fish I attempted to rescue.

By the end of that first week following the great lab flood, the tank was down to only about 6 or 7 juvenile guppies - the survivors.  Natural selection (a-ha!) had taken care of the rest.

The surviving guppies grew up to be the most beautiful, most amazingly ornate guppies I have ever seen.  For anyone who knows anything about evolution, this shouldn't be much of a surprise - something in the genes of those fish that allowed them to survive this nightmare is also giving them the beautiful bright indicator that screams: "Hey! My genes are the shit! Mate with me!"

If I was a guppy, I would totally mate with one these survivors.  Charles Darwin would be pleased!