Fishiding Artificial Fish Habitat is unique because of its size, complexity, and the protection it provides juvenile fish. |
Constructing a conglomeration of rubber tubing, plastic barrels, and old hose, throwing it into the lake and calling it fish habitat because we saw a bass next to it, is like putting a cardboard box on the street corner and calling it “housing” when a homeless person takes refuge in it. Most DIY fish habitat is as much fish habitat as a plastic tarp strung between two shopping carts is “a house” to a homeless person.
Look around at your own home. Why is it comfortable? Why do
you like it? Look past the man cave you’ve built in the basement, the expensive
wall-to-wall carpeting, and the refrigerator with the built-in ice-cube
dispenser. What makes your house useful and practical is its utilitarian
functionality.
The insulation keeps you warm in the winter. The roof keeps
the rain out. There’s a dark bedroom to sleep in at night. The doors and
windows all have locks that provide you with safety and security. Your pantry
is stocked with food and you have a kitchen to prepare it. Your home functions
in a way that addresses all your family’s needs in a utilitarian way.
By and large, DIY artificial fish habitat doesn’t do
anything close to that. To be comparable, artificial fish habitat needs to be
large to accommodate many fish. (You wouldn’t want to live in a one-bedroom
bungalow with a family of six would you?) It needs to provide a refuge for
young fish the same way your children have their bedrooms where they can be
away from grown-ups while hanging out with their friends. There needs to be
on-site food so you’re not driving to McDonald’s every single time you want a
snack. Size, security, protection, privacy, and food are just some of the
important aspects of any home that we would never compromise on in our dwellings
yet seemingly never consider when constructing habitat for fish. Instead,
we create the equivalent of tent cities in the most impoverished part of town
and congratulate ourselves when homeless people congregate there to get out of
the rain. That’s not a solution to the homeless problem any more than lashing
rubber hoses to cinder blocks is to solving the lack of fish habitat.
What’s needed in both scenarios is genuine housing/habitat
for both impoverished people and fish.
When looking at the wide variety of homemade so-called fish
habitat, one thing seems to be evident. Most well-intentioned builders don’t
seem to know exactly what fish need and the poverty of their designs betray
this fact. Bad designs continue to be copied, while far superior ones are
ignored. This is because so few of us can tell the difference between good
designs and poor ones. This failure is epidemic but also understandable. Fish
live in a separate world largely invisible to us. We rarely glimpse them in
their natural habitat and have little idea of how they live or how they spend
their time. Our only interaction is when we hoist them into the boat on the end
of our fishing lines. Occasionally we notice that fishing under the neighbor’s
dock or next to that old Cyprus tree stump seem to be good spots, but we’re
completely in the dark about why. We often leap to the false
conclusion that any structure in the water is a fish’s home and any solid piece
of material we find in the back of our garage could work just as well. Do
it yourselfers are thwarted not only by their lack of understanding of fish but
also by what materials might currently be available in their sheds and
garages. I think this explains why we see so many awful constructions.
To design and construct authentic fish habitats
and not merely dilapidated, makeshift shelters of the kind we might see on
urban streets, we need to think backward. We need to think first about function
over form. Utility over availability. We need our designs to meet the specific
needs of fish. We can look to natural habitats for guidance. Natural habitat
has a myriad of desirable characteristics but for this discussion, we can
single out the three most often violated elements that any proposed
artificially constructed fish habitat must have. The first is size. Is our
construction large enough to accommodate a community of fishes? The second is
protection. Are there tight spaces, crevices, alleys, pockets, holes,
depressions, and retreats that smaller fish can occupy that larger fish
absolutely cannot access? The third is complexity. Is the structure large and
complex enough to offer shade, to block sight-lines, and to hide or conceal
what’s in and around it? If it were in your backyard, could your kids use it
when they play hide and seek? Keeping in mind this trio of primary
functions will help you begin to understand what fish need and enable you to
reject bad design ideas and eliminate potential construction materials that
don’t amplify these important characteristics.
Across our country, there are many bodies of water from
large sprawling reservoirs to small backyard ponds. Many of them are lacking
fish habitat for a variety of reasons. In many cases, artificial habitat can be
a surrogate but only if it addresses in utilitarian ways the
features of genuine habitat.
If you work in the fish management sector, you and your
colleagues have an obligation to be very critical of the designs being paraded
in front of you. If we’re not more careful about scrutinizing and properly
evaluating artificial fish habitats, we run the risk of unknowingly filling our
waterways with useless materials instead of creating legitimate habitat.
Certainly, there’s much to discuss about creating artificial
fish habitat, and because true innovation has slowed to a trickle, we find
ourselves mired in a kind of estuary between realizing we have a habitat
deficiency and creating the kinds of authentic habitat that will make any
difference. Artificial fish habitat needs to provide functional value
to our fish. The scale of the problem is enormous in many locations, and won’t
be solved by adding more sub-standard and inadequate
structures any more than human homelessness can be solved by putting out more
cardboard boxes and tents.
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