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conclusion: reefer madness Our bodies are coral reefs teeming with polyps, sponges, gorgonans, and free-swimming macrophages continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood, and biles. —alphonso lingis, “Animal Body, Inhuman Face,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe Keeping ›uids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort—and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion. —zygmunt bauman, Liquid Modernity The faithful assembled at the halfway point of the 2006 International Marine Aquarium Conference (IMAC) to hear featured speaker Mike Paletta describe “setting up a LARGE aquarium.”1 How large? So large he could actually submerge in it; so large that it required consultation with a structural engineer and the sides had to be individually fabricated. It took up his garage—now a ‹sh room. It was so large that husbands were told to cover their wives’ eyes—the “wife acceptance factor” (WAF) was going to be stretched to the breaking point. A slide ›ashed, giving the setup cost as thirty thousand dollars, not including ‹sh and other stock. It took four months to complete (“You have to tell your wife it will only be a mess for two weeks,” Paletta explained). This was a reef tank; the complex lighting required to ensure the viability and vivid coloration of the coral was so august that it cast a blue glow onto the snow-covered hill outside his Pennsylvania home. This, in turn, attracted the attention of the local police, who assumed Paletta was growing something other than coral, and he didn’t help himself later when an of‹cer came to his door to ask about the light. “Oh,” he said. “That’s just my reef tank.” The of‹cer, it seems, was not a fellow hobbyist. “Reefer” meant a different kind of intoxicant to him, and he jumped to the wrong conclusion. Then, Paletta said, the real nuisance commenced: “I had to show him the 219 tank and he stayed for two hours.” But, Paletta concluded, it was worth it all: the lying to the “Mrs.,” the huge diversion of funds, the inconvenient brushes with the law. Judging by the enthusiasm of the packed, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male audience, none would disagree. After all, Paletta noted, he was a “coral addict.” This way, he reasoned, “I could get every single coral I wanted.” Three years later, at the 2009 IMAC, “Joan,” one of relatively few women reefers in attendance, told me how her tanks have taken over the family home, and she doesn’t plan to stop. She now has ten; they occupy every room, including the bathroom. In a formulation I’ve heard applied to everything from designer purses to classic muscle cars to greyhounds, she described the hobby’s “potato chip factor”: you can’t be satis‹ed with just one tank.2 Abstemiousness is not a notable trait of dedicated aquarists. Even Philip Henry Gosse, who has been depicted as practically a Puritan zealot, stuffed a truly prodigious number of creatures into his tank while counseling restraint on this very issue.3 From its earliest inception, it seems as if the home aquarium opened the ›oodgates of a unique and curious desire; the results threatened to swamp its glass walls and even the family home. Paletta joked (again deploying the WAF) that spouses feared aquarists “would seal up the house and ‹ll it with water—which,” he added after a pause, “we would do.” Paletta’s insatiable longing to have every coral he wanted was a logical answer to Henry Butler’s rhetorical question, posed almost 150 years before, “With the bountiful contents of the wide ocean and the ›owing river made so accessible, where is the taste, however bizarre or capricious, that must perforce go ungrati‹ed?”4 The move from simple grati‹cation to full-on addiction is not merely a function of the ubiquity of addictologia in contemporary popular discourse. In 1956, the American Medical Association declared that alcoholism was an illness. The tank was described in similar terms well before, as in the opening paragraphs of S. S. Van Dine’s remarkable foreword to Alfred Morgan’s Tropical Fishes and Home Aquaria (1935). The breeding and raising of tropical ‹sh is both a scienti‹c pastime and a virulent disease. It is as fascinating as it is malignant. It is uplifting and edifying— and also bothersome and heart breaking. But whatever the disadvantages may be, they...

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