Pictures of the CFZ's fishy activities

The CFZ is setting up a fish tank in our local pub, the Farmer's Arms. It's called engaging with the local community and the presence of lager and whisky has nothing to do with it!

The tank's in the restaurant, seen here behind the bucket-carrying Oll Lewis. Oll is the CFZ ecologist and deals with many aquatic matters - including carrying water around!

Over to Oll:


Now that spring has finally arrived in Britain, and the weather has started to warm after a long cold winter now is the time to progress some of the various animal-related projects the CFZ have been working on.

The purpose of the display tank in the Farmers arms is not only to raise the CFZ’s profile in the local community but to educate people about fish and get people more interested in natural colorations of fish, rather than the gaudy flashy and often unhealthy fish that are often bread specifically for aesthetic reasons by the more unscrupulous members of the aquarist community.

That will take a day or two to settle....

Fish are fascinating creatures and look beautiful in their natural colourations and the second CFZ project, the bitterling tank, illustrates this perfectly.

Max checks out the newly-set-up bitterling tank

Bitterling reproduce by laying their eggs in freshwater mussels, the fry get a warm safe place to develop and live off the mucus in the mussel. In a textbook example of symbiosis, when the mussels reproduces they send out parasitic larvae that form small cists in a fish’s gills, when the larvae have developed they fall off the fish.


This can weaken a fish slightly but the fish is not usually in any danger.