tag:dreamwidth.org,2016-01-18:2481079The History of Koi Aquaculture in SingaporeDon't play koi with me... :Pkoiture2016-01-19T15:54:17Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2016-01-18:2481079:265Introduction: The history and science of ornamental aquaculture of Singapore2016-01-18T07:16:15Z2016-01-19T15:54:17Zpublic0<b><u>Who cares about ornamental aquaculture in Singapore?</u></b> <br /><br />There is so many aspects to this! Why is koi aquaculture in Singapore important? Why should we care? <br /><br />Let's go from the beginning. Most historical and literature about aquaculture, especially ornamental aquaculture, comes from British history. British and European scientists got to dominate the scientific discourse of aquatic animals, they developed the aquarium, etcetera etcetera. The home aquarium craze seems to have started from Britian at the turn of the Industrial Era. <br /><br />But that doesn't mean that no one else in the world did anything about ornamental fish! For the British to populate their tanks, they had to get 'exotic' species that weren't their common river minnows because they weren't interested in what they could easily see everyday, right? They wanted the exotic, the strange, the colourful. <br /><br />Tropical fish tended to be exotic and very colourful, and that's what other countries supplied. <br /><br />The thing about ornamental fish is that weight for weight, ornamental fish were far more expensive and profitable than food fish. Food fish were bought and sold by the unit mass. Ornamental fish were sold by the individual. Granted a lot of it was because ornamental fish were transported over long distances, and the attrition due to the fish just plain dying while being shipped over meant that the remaining ones had cumulative value, but even if ALL the fish were to arrive safely, people were paying something like a few pence for a single tiny tropical fish not longer than 3 centimeters, while for food fish they were paying pennies per hundred grams, maybe. <br /><br />For Singapore, a country recently given independence, ornamental fish trade was a way to survive. Food farming was really for subsistence level, not really for export. But ornamental fish farming, such as for guppies, which took up much less space, and could sell for a few hundred times per unit mass compared to food fish, they were hugely profitable. <br /><br />The early ornamental fish industry in Singapore was then profitable, and all about survival for a tiny new independent country. <br /><br />Now we talk about koi. The koi carp has yet more strange necessasities tied into it, and as an ornamental fish is and was different from other ornamental fish like guppies and swordtails and mollies. <br /><br />For one, to keep koi, one required land and deep pockets to set up the appropriate pond and habitat. Two, koi were from a temperate country with obvious and strong seasons - Singapore is tropical, and warm all year round. Three, koi has to be shipped and transported to Singapore. <br /><br />So of course the practices of keeping koi will be different from two different countries - Japanese practices versus SIngaporean practices. But then what affects the ornamental fish industry as a whole, will affect koi keeping - regulations in keeping fish in Singapore, regulations in importing and exporting of fish, all of these affect the koi. While the trend of koi keeping in Singapore is fading for various reasons, there are bigger, larger answers as to why the ornamental fish industry is also declining in general. <br /><br /><u><b>So what are the research questions here?</b></u> <br /><br />My big fancy question here is about the generation of knowledge of involved in ornamental aquaculture in Singapore. <br /><br />But that's huge and vague. <br /><br />So what I will do is break it down. <br /><br />I'm interested in how do people know what they know about keeping koi. How did they find out who or where to look for this information? WHo are the people involved in this? <br /><br />The easy answer when looking at the question about "who knows things" is to look for the scientists. Scientists are supposed to know things right? <br /><br />So there are the scientists in universities and academia. But there are also scientists in the regulatory governmental body that regulates and oversees the ornamental fish industry. These people within the regulatory body , in Singapore, would be working for the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority. <br /><br />Then there are also the farmers who import and export the fish, they have to know how to take care of the fish right? then there are the hobbyists, those who keep the fish because they like to, and want to, and they have to know how to rear, breed, cultivate, these fish because otherwise they will die and then they will have no pets. <br /><br />So a question here is, how do these groups of people interact? how do these groups of people transmit their knowledge to each other, how do they influence each others' practices - or how they DO - of aquaculture? How did this change over time? What were the factors that allowed ornamental aquaculture to become socially important? How technology influence aquacultural practises - or is it the other way round, or is it a thing where both influence each other mutally or to different degrees? <br /><br />That's what I have so far, and I hope it sounds interesting for people to keep reading on as I try to update and formulate my thoughts and data. :)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=koiture&ditemid=265" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments