So I took the "Ladies" out for the moonlight cruise last night then dropped them off at my marina where they had dinner. It was Lobster night. I sat at the bar and ordered a hamburger. I wanted the Ahi Tuna burger but that was $22.00 so I went with the $18.00 hamburger. Yeah, I know. So the guy brings out this huge burger and a few feet to the right of me on the bar is a red squeeze bottle of "ketchup", so I grab it and squirt it all over my burger.
The "ketchup" is fluorescent green. So I say to the bartender, "Is this some new kind of ketchup?".
He says NO, THATS SOAP. I said, "Soap?" What kind of soap? He said he does the glasses with it. So I said "So you keep dish soap in a red squeeze ketchup bottle that virtually every diner in the United Stated keeps ketchup in, and you leave it on the bar where probably half the people coming in and sitting at the bar are eating hamburgers".
So I got a new hamburger sans the soap.
Anyway, the "girls" had a great time.
Getting back to fish, I am amazed that almost no one autopsies their fish after they die.
I remember once on the news they asked this doctor, how many autopsies he performed on dead people? He said "all the autopsies I perform are on dead people".
OK getting back to fish, I promise. If they find a dead person, and here in New York and especially in Manhattan they find a lot of dead bodies, they just don't look at them and say "Oh well, he has no spots so we don't know why he died?"
They don't do that because there is very little you can tell from looking at someone as to how they died. Of course if they have to pry pieces of him from in between the subway car wheels that would be an indication as the cause of death, but most of the time, they find someone laying there with a nice suit on, decent hair cut, healthy looking, but dead. That calls for an autopsy. Fish autopsies are simple and if you screw it up, most of the time the family won't complain. And, different from people, you don't have to put the dead fish body back together again to make it presentable. You can fed it to your cat so it is like recycling.
If you find a dead fish and it is not yet eaten up, just take a razor knife and cut the thing open starting at the bottom, the soft parts. Lay out the parts and look at them while trying not to squash anything as fish parts are rather delicate. You should find the swim bladder, stomach, liver and most importantly the gills. Get yourself a jeweler's loupe of at least a magnifying glass and if the fish just died you may see parasites in it's gills. Usually that is accompanied by tears in the delicate gill tissues that should look like feathers. You may also find blood in the muscles near the tail. I find that a lot in skinny fish such as copperbands or tangs and I think it comes from collection because to me I think those very sharp ribs sometimes puncture blood vessels. If you see a dark area on the side of a thin fish, that is usually internal bleeding and the fish rarely, if ever recover and Obamacare won't save them. People tell me that autopsying fish is to complicated for the average hobbiest to perform. Yes, if you are a Sissy you won't do this. But I eat fish almost every day and virtually every one of them suffocated on the deck of a ship and by me eating them or autopsying them didn't make their life any easier or harder. But if I find out why it died, I can maybe better be able to prevent it in the future. "Or" I could just flush the thing and chalk it up to the Moon God and buy another fish.
You can see an area on this copperband where it is just starting to show. You have to look at these fish closely but don't put your head so close to your monitor that you get grease on the screen. Below the black dot near his upper rear you can see a slighter darker area that may just look like some raised scales. That is how it starts, then it becomes darker and sometimes protrudes a little. This is very common on thin, newly collected fish.
Don't buy fish with this condition as even though it looks benign, it is caused by internal bleeding as this fish died and I autopsied it. I have seen this many times.
Those fish should have no marks or raised scales especially along the ribs.
These are 2 different fish with the same problem. Look closely
