Hobbies: Come Feed My Trigger Fish

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Gun at the ready, Buddy Roberts maneuvered carefully around the towering fire coral, 25 feet under the ocean off Key West. His tiny quarry, a 1½-in. jewel fish, iridescent blue spots gleaming on the deeper velvet blue of its body, hesitated at the coral's edge; half a dozen gaudy parrot fish cruised along the ocean bottom, crunching and chittering as they fed. Cautiously, Roberts extended his gun toward the jewel fish, then quickly pulled the plunger, sucking his victim through the transparent barrel and down into the holding chamber below.

Salt-caked, coral-scraped, sunburned and exhausted, Roberts, a 33-year-old chiropractor, returned to his home in Pensacola, Fla., thoroughly pleased with his fishing trip. The plastic bags in his car held some 25 reef fish, captured alive with his Plexiglas "slurp gun," which is one of the latest pieces of equipment used in that fast-growing and prestigious U.S. hobby: collecting saltwater fish.

Artificial Ocean. The keeper of a saltwater aquarium is to an ordinary tropical-fish fancier what a Ferrari man is to a Chevy driver. Marine specimens are hard to get, harder to keep, expensive to feed, and demanding of space, time and attention. But they are the most strangely marked and wonderfully colorful creatures on earth—so brilliant that they seem to glow with their own light, making fresh-water tropicals look drab. This is one reason why there are some 250,000 private marine aquariums in the U.S. today, ranging in size from 21 gallons to 50 gallons, while 15 years ago there were almost none at all.

One reason is the popularity of scuba diving; hunting and collecting fish as Chiropractor Roberts does with his slurp gun is much more rewarding than spearing them. Another major factor has been the jet age, which has brought the coral reefs of Fiji and other faraway sources of exotic fish within a few hours of the U.S. This shorter travel time, plus new sleep drugs which make fish inert, thus reducing their oxygen intake by two-thirds, means that more fish can be transported in less water—and hence sold more cheaply.

Most important factor of all is the development of artificial sea water. Real ocean water is risky because of the tiny organisms it contains, which die and foul it under aquarium conditions. To overcome this difficulty, several commercial formulas have been developed which can be dissolved in tap water with excellent results.

The Slowest Horse. Marine collectors must content themselves with fewer—and smaller—fish in bigger tanks. Tiny fresh-water tropicals, accustomed to crowded living in a brackish backwater pool, obviously need far less tank space than the denizens of vast coral reefs that are flushed by two tides every day.

One expert, Ichthyologist Herbert Axelrod, puts the proper aquarium proportion at two gallons of salt water to an inch of fish—a limit of five 2-in. fish in a 20-gal. tank. Sea horses—such improbable creatures that many people think them mythical—are less active and need less tank space; so slow are they, in fact, that they must be segregated from most other fish, or they will starve to death.