Personal Narrative: Goldfish

I have always been fascinated with the natural world around me. Many of my youthful hours were spent outside observing and catching wildlife in and around the lake where we lived. From age six, I spent many hours catching minnows, turtles, and catfish and putting them in a kiddie pool to observe them. When I was nine, I also caught some very large goldfish, which captivated my attention. I was curious as to why the goldfish were overgrown. I learned that these goldfish were ex-pets whose owners dumped them into the lake and let them fend for themselves. Because the fish were no longer constrained by the size of their fish tanks and had access to plenty of extra food sources, they adapted and subsequently grew almost twice as large as their domestic counterparts. The findings amazed and fascinated me.

I was determined to create an ideal habitat for it to live in. I started off with a large, translucent container with minute holes perforated in the top to allow oxygen flow, then covered the bottom with rocks, dirt, moss, leaves, and a little bowl of water. After observing the tendencies of the snake, I deduced that it preferred a moist environment because it spent most of its time in the damp dirt by the water bowl or under the soggy moss. My next challenge was figuring out its diet. I tried everything from spiders and worms to ladybugs and the broccoli from my dinner plate before finding out that salamanders were only things that it would consume. Unfortunately, I had to let the snake go before the week was up because I couldn’t find more than one