Eating Your Baby Projects - A Fishy Tale

It's not unusual to hear people describe projects as being their babies. People of all varieties do this... knitters talking about their latest woolly hats, writers their stories and candlemakers their candles.

I pondered this after a recent experience, when I woke to find two baby fishes peering at me*. I had two more turn up before the thought fully crystallised.

You see, life is dangerous for a baby fish. The fish in my tank go for quantity rather than quality. Some babies will simply never make it, even if the conditions are ideal. It usually means something's wrong inside them. But conditions aren't ideal. Their parents see them as novelty snacks (whose consumption will go towards making the next batch of eggs).

My four babies only made it because the number of adult fish in the tank had reduced and the plants had grown up. Even then, only four survived out of however many eggs laid in the tank. At this point, luck comes into play. Though the unhealthy ones get eaten, many healthy babies will also be eaten.

It's a sturdy, and lucky, fish that survives until too-big-to-eat size.

And that's the problem with the project as baby idea. People are thinking of the wrong sort of baby. Projects aren't human babies, who'll be nurtured and have every chance of success. They're fish babies. In order for some of the babies to succeed, you need to think like a fish. Demolish the flawed ones yourself, and some of the ones who were fine, to make way for better ones. You can re-use materials and ideas. Sometimes, it will be about luck. The red woolly hat will sell to the person who loves red, even if the blue one was better.

But whatever happens, you're not far away from the next batch of eggs and babies. Fish keep trying and trying, until the day when the tank is right for some babies to survive. They don't complicate it or angst about it. They just keep working on the next batch of eggs.

You can learn a lot from a fish. It's time to eat a few babies.


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* I tweeted about this, as some readers will recognise. To pre-empt the questions, the fry are kerri tetra (Inpaichthys kerri) and all four are doing well. They're also hard to photograph, especially as their colours rarely show in pictures**. So you'll have to make do with my artistic impression.

** The males are shiny blue, when they catch the light. The fact I keep shiny fish is probably not a surprise.