Florida Fish “Crop” Suffers “Shortage”

Striped African Chichlid

It’s been cold here in South Florida. I know, I know, it’s been a lot colder everywhere else. But we’re not equipped for cold down here. When we have three nights of temperatures hovering over 30 degrees, we have big problems. For instance, though I brought all of my potted plants inside, the most I could do was cover vines and trees and shrubs, about 50% of which are now completely brown and shatter when you touch them. On the upside, I don’t like to weed my lawn because I don’t want to kill the poor weeds that try so hard to emerge, but evidently they aren’t cold hardy and are now dead anyway, and I didn’t kill them.

The cold means something different to Florida farmers, though. Frost likely means a loss of crops and a loss of income. This of course is true for all farmers, as well. But a particular type of farming industry “has suffered more than any other because of this year’s unusually long cold snap,” according to Damien Cave of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. That industry is . . . tropical fish. In “Florida Fish are Freezing, Creating Severe Guppy Shortage,” we learn that “The little guys are dying by the millions.”

Millions.

The end result, which we aren’t sure of yet as the cold continues, though it is ending today from what I hear, “could be devastating.” To whom? It rhymes with farmers.

Fish farmers have already taken a hit this year that is in addition to the recession, which has hit just about everyone but Goldman Sachs. This hit is in the form of a bit of good news for fish, as there has been “a slow shift away from live hobbies and toward electronics.” I never heard the term “live hobbies” before. Interesting.

One fish farmer “has already lost over 100,000 tropical fish — a $535,000 hit.” He lost them? I wonder where they could be?

Let me clear up what happened to them. They are used to living in water that is very warm (well over 70 degrees) and they have serious difficulty when the water falls below 60 degrees. Beginning three or four days ago, the air temperature fell into the 20s and the water temperature fell as well (to 45 degrees). And millions of fish died. And many of the survivors will die later from disease or the dramatic and swift temperature swing back upward.

But fortunately for some farmers, “federal aid might be available. Farmers with losses of more than 50 percent can file crop insurance claims with the Department of Agriculture to receive assistance.”

It’s strange to me hearing about fish in “crop” language, as if they’re oranges or strawberries. And reading about dead sentient beings only in terms of how much their “loss” is costing some human, as if death by hypothermia isn’t a big deal for the fish.

The propensity of humans to “entertain” themselves at the expense of other living beings isn’t a new phenomenon. Perhaps the recession, the decrease in “live hobbies” and the tragic deaths of animals brought into this world simply to be put in a small tank as visual entertainment, might get some people who create the fish to profit from their lives to think twice about what they’re doing. Maybe they’ll find new careers that don’t involve creating beings simply to exploit them.

Probably not, but I can dream . . .

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Photo from flickr user kotobuki711