The Mating Dance

So about 5 years ago a friend gave me a big outdoor planter/bowl thingy and some goldfish. They were fairly happy out there in their big dish, next to the front door in the sun, but I finally broke down and decided to buy a real fishtank. The last time I had a fish was back in Nome. I was perhaps 5 years old, and of course my mom had to do the cleaning and feeding duties, since I had more important things to do like dig holes in the yard and listen to Jesus Christ Superstar on the hi-fi. Yeah, baby.....8-track deck, am/fm radio, turntable, fake wood speakers.. We knew how to live it up back in the day.

And then one day my goldfish (we're still in my childhood, here) is discovered floating, thoroughly dead, on the surface of his little tank, so mom flushed him, I was sad for a few hours, and I went on my way secure in the knowledge that fishie just lived out his days and nature took its course. Little did I know. Not too many months ago, a good 30 years after my first pet had met his maker, my mother apparently forgets her original cover story and revealed that she was cleaning his tank one day and accidentally refilled it with hot water and cooked the poor little guy alive. Oh the cruel truths that adults keep from us!! Maybe it was best that my little mind was not polluted with images of a helpless goldfish screaming his last, but I am amused by how we are sometimes forced to rewrite bits of our histories.

So anyway, I hadn't really been interested in owning more fish since then, but here I was confronted with yet another little shiny life in my hands. I got the fishtank, watched the goldfish swimming around thinking their goldfish thoughts, but I wanted a little more color, so I took a deep breath and bought some guppies. For those not familiar with this lovely little creature, you can see some pics and info here: http://www.guppies.com/ They have gorgeous colors, the males more so than the females. And I soon discovered something that wasn't mentioned to me at the pet store: guppies, unlike many fish, do not lay eggs but instead give birth to live babies. One day a female is looking a tad overweight, the next day you notice a little swarm of teeny tiny fishies huddled in a corner of the tank trying desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid being eaten by their older kin.

Well, faced with this unexpected bounty of fecundity I soon invested in another tank. Then another. And oh why not one more? Ended up with five in the end; one for newborns, three for adults, and one for my oscar, aptly named Oscar, who is another story altogether. So I decided to see how these guppies got their business done, since they were clearly, judging from the number of baby-swarms popping up at regular intervals, involved in quite a bit of said business.

So here's the procedure: A male, his dorsal fin raised, his glorious tail flowing behind him, begins courting a female he finds irissistible. (It appears that male guppies live by the "bigger is better" philosophy of mate-selection.) He chases her around the tank mercilessly, waiting until he has her attention or she gets too tired to keep running, and launching into his seductive wiggle-dance. That's the only way I can think to describe it since that's pretty much what it is: he wiggles his shining form, flaring his glowing tail, displaying his little heart out in hopes that she'll give him some sign of acquiescence. It seems to play out something like:

Male guppy "Hey, baby, look at me. Hey! Look! Look at me! Hey! Baby! Why you runnin"? Hey!! Look at me!!! Hey!!!"
Female guppy "No! Leave me alone! Quit it! Leave me alone!! Go away!! Quit it!! Get this guy off my back!! Dammit!! No!! Leave me alone!!!! Dammit!! Quit it!!"

What this ultimate sign of acquiescence is I have yet to determine. Possibly be some form of subtle guppie body language that the human eye does not detect. Or it could just be submission due to exhaustion, though I prefer to think in more romantic terms.

So, by whatever mean, the female signals her willingness to cooperate and joyous boy-guppy releases a little cloud of guppy sperm, which somehow finds its way to the apropriate part of the girl guppy. Maybe she has a built-in suction device? Need to investigate this further. Anyhow, maybe a month or so later she gets alarmingly rotund, and sometime during the night (and it's almost always at night) she releases her brood, ready to swim and fend for themselves. She doesn't seem protective of them, but she doesn't tend to go after them either, maybe because I tend to overfeed my fish. I then must get my fish net thingy and scoop out these tiny babies one by one (you try catching a moving target that's 1/4 the size of a grain of rice) and transfer them carefully to the nursery tank where they can grow in safety and learn what it is to be a guppy, which looks like a pretty chill life from where I sit.

So all this leads me to thoughts of human mating rituals and how ridiculously complicated we tend to make things. All the nervousness, preening, grooming, stress, insecurity........is there anyone past the age of puberty who doesn't have some mortifying memory of an awkward, disastrous attempt at relating to the opposite sex? Ugh, I try not to think about it. Too painful. So wouldn't it be so much nicer if we could just do it the guppy way? Guy sees girl he likes, he does his little dance, she says "Oh fine, if it'll make you leave me alone" and that's that! No fuss, no stress, maybe some tiring chase scenes, but overall a much less traumatic way of doing things. Just a thought.