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New Article: The GloFish Chronicles!

Today's article examines GloFish, the hot new pet fad that lets people buy "glowing" fish for just five bucks a piece. You've probably seen 'em mentioned in the news over the past few months, and the story was just too offbeat to pass up on. Do GloFish match the hype? Not really. I'm sure others will say differently, but my batch wasn't anywhere near as "otherworldly" as all of the reports and debates suggested. They're just fish that are kinda sorta shiny. Article provides close-up photos of the three I bought, plus an extra close-up photo of their disgusting fish food. Unless you've got a blacklight, they're nothing to go nuts over.

Posted by Matt on 01/12/2004. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 112 comments

Ah yes…Alba, the Glo-Bunny…I wrote about Eduardo Kac (the artist who collaborated w/the geneticists) in my master’s thesis. Interesting guy. Also interesting that someone should mention glowing chinchillas…when I first heard about the Glo-Bunny, my friend and I discussed the idea of breeding glow-in-the-dark chinchillas, putting oversize hamster tubes (you know, those clear-orange plastic Hartz "habitats" that our small rodent friends seem to enjoy so much) all over the ceiling of his studio, and letting about 25 of those glowing chinchillas run around in there whenever he had parties at his place. Super fun! We’re still waiting for science to catch up…

Chestnuts roasted by cyberelf @ 01/15/2004 3:09 AM

Oh, and a fish story too (I figure since I’ve never posted before, I should try to catch up a bit) – Had a goldfish…won him at the state fair at that booth where you lob a ping-pong ball into a table full of fishbowls, and if it landed in a fishbowl, you won a goldfish. Seems cruel now that I look back at it, but I was like 8 at the time and the possibility of winning a live goldfish was irresistible. So anyway I have my fishie (imaginatively named Goldie), and I go away on summer vacation, and have to leave it with my cousin, who has a big aquarium w/lots of fishies, so I’m thinking it’ll be like Club Med for my fish, since at my house it lived alone in a tiny round bowl. Come back from vacation, and lo and behold…my cousin’s fishies had EATEN MY FISH’S EYES…AND IT WAS STILL ALIVE! Holy crap. But bless its heart, it lived for another year or so…it would just swim along the bottom of the bowl, scooping up whatever food it found there. I renamed it Ray Charles. It was kinda freaky to look at though, swimmin’ around with no eyes. Perhaps that helps explain why I am the way I am today.

Chestnuts roasted by cyberelf @ 01/15/2004 3:18 AM

CyberElf, might I just say one thing…. AAAAAAHHHHHHGGGGGEEEEEKKKKKK! Great, a new inmage to feature in my nightmares.

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 01/15/2004 11:20 AM

trajeal: No, you can’t do italics the vBulletin message board way. You gotta do them the HTML way, which is very similar to the vBulletin way, except with the lesser than (points left) and greater than (points right) symbols around the letters instead of the square brackets: (lesser than symbol)i(greater than symbol)word(lesser than symbol)/i(greater than symbol) = word. Same for bold.

Chestnuts roasted by Steve Brandon @ 01/15/2004 1:56 PM

Now, if anyone wants to know how to make a word with a hyperlink, that’s a tad more complicated because it doesn’t bear much resemblance to vBulletin:

(lesser than symbol)a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/"(greater than symbol)Rotten Tomatoes(lesser than symbol)/a(greater than symbol) = http://www.rottentomatoes.com/">Rotten Tomatoes.

Don’t forget the quotation marks around the URL.

Chestnuts roasted by Steve Brandon @ 01/15/2004 2:05 PM

kingklash – glad I could help :)

Chestnuts roasted by cyberelf @ 01/15/2004 6:02 PM

Thanks! That question was so old, I was sure I wasn’t going to get an answer for it.

A friend of mine had a fish that had all of the fins eaten off, but it continued to live. It must have been top heavy, b/c it would just sorta bounce around the bottom of the tank on its face, w/ its tail sticking straight up. It would try to turn, esp when there was food floating down around it, but it never could manage. It lived for about a year like that.

I want to try this now <> FISH!<>

Chestnuts roasted by trajeal @ 01/16/2004 9:35 AM

Trying again: Fa-fa-fa-fishy!

Chestnuts roasted by trajeal @ 01/16/2004 9:37 AM

Ooh, yay!

Chestnuts roasted by trajeal @ 01/16/2004 9:37 AM

Prowlus: The method you mentioned for introducing the coral genes into the GloFish was used in the first generation of the fish. Unlike the various types of artificially dyed fish on the market, the GloFish actually breed true. I’ll admit that I am not thrilled by florescent danios, at least as a commercial product. On the other hand, the same company that produced these fish has also been working on actual bioluminscent aquarium fish, something that strikes me as much neater. (A florescent object glows when you energize it with an outside lightsource. A luminescent object glows due to an energy reaction within the object. Thus the glowy paint is florescent while a light bulb is luminescent)

Chestnuts roasted by Voxpopuli @ 01/16/2004 12:55 PM

The pet store I got mine at simply offered them as "Red Danios – $5.99" No mention of genetic modification, glowing, and nary a blacklight in sight. If all the hype ends outside the pet-shop door, no wonder the craze is dropping off — who’d wanna buy what looks like a six-buck red fish? But, hey, I bought two — they look waaaay more bright red than those in the pictures… they do even seem to glow faintly, even under regular light. Must be a different strain. And I haven’t tried the blacklight thing yet — so maybe there is a chance for startling neon glow-in-the-darkness after all. ::shrug::
Oh, and just to add to this litany of Things Nobody Particularly Cares About, I named ‘em Uranium-235 and Rubidium, after the radioactive elements. ::grin:: Yay for Yuri and Ruby.
heh.

Chestnuts roasted by Ash @ 01/16/2004 5:44 PM

Does anyone remember strawberry twinkies or know if they still make them?

Chestnuts roasted by Joey @ 01/16/2004 7:02 PM

Ummm to the one called "Prowlus" Whats an Oscar and what does "Ciclidae" mean?

Chestnuts roasted by Daveykins @ 01/17/2004 9:26 PM

Daveykins:

Oscars are a really big predatory fish in the fish family Cichlidae (a group of related fish). I have my doubts a big oscar would even waste the energy on chasing danios.

I had pretty much the same sentiment about the danios, except I keep Polypterus, which you can see at my website. In fact, I actually have fed them danios (but not glofish, that would be a waste of money).

And YAY! The italics worked! I can be taxonomically pure once more!

Chestnuts roasted by Sean @ 01/17/2004 10:00 PM

Oscars are great fun, they are like the puppy dogs of the fish world. More personality then you can imagine. Mine have a tendancy to ‘beg’ for food and want to be petted

Chestnuts roasted by robbdj @ 01/18/2004 12:01 PM

Yeah, I doubt anyone will see this, or if its been said b4, but oh well,…

As an actual genetics najor, I can tell you that genetically modified organisms really arent dangerous at all. Nor are they all that hard to make, if you have the gene you want to tag on sequenced. The coolest thing I’ve seen are mice that had GFP (green fluorescent protein) being expressed in their skin. They really glow quite green under UV light. No reason was given for it, that I saw. But GFP is cool, so that’s reason enough.

Chestnuts roasted by TOP1214 @ 01/19/2004 12:24 PM

Matt,

Nice article, but one suggestion. On of the funniest of the many hilarious items on the site is the old zoo tours that were going on for awhile. The key was the haikus from the animals (I think it was the croc farm). Like the talking Hulk reviews, the personification was just great. Maybe fish Haikus are in the future?
Keep it up. I got Unicron for Xmas. Am slowly adding Microcons.
Signed, A grown man twinkie addict.

Chestnuts roasted by been @ 01/19/2004 2:28 PM

hey matt whatever happened to the hermit crabs

Chestnuts roasted by reso @ 01/21/2004 2:22 AM

I fanyone is interested in "glowing" fish, and are wondering why they don’t seem to, I will answer this question for you.
These genetically modified fish have been altered in that a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish called GFP or "green fluorecent protein" has been put into them and is expressed ubiquitously throughout the organism.
What this means is that these fish don’t "glow", they "fluorece". Simply put, by placing these fish under the right fluorescent wavelength, they will glow bright green. Other GFP variants have been created in different colors, including red, cyan and yellow.
if anyone wants to know the genetics behind it email me- gbienwillner@hotmail.com.

Chestnuts roasted by the geneticist @ 01/21/2004 8:10 PM

This GloFish hype reminds me of Seamonkeys when I was a kid. In the back of every comic book was an ad showing a Seamonkey family, the daughter with a ribbon in her hair, the son with a beach ball, the Dad smoking a pipe. I finally bought a kit at Target when I was in college a few years ago and they truely sucked ass. They looked like tadpoles and died within a week.

Chestnuts roasted by Fr8train @ 01/22/2004 12:13 PM

I weep for your chinchilla. :(

Chestnuts roasted by Zombie Clay @ 01/22/2004 11:51 PM

Neon Tetras are neat little fish, and while they don’t actually ‘glow’ like a light, they have neat neon coloured stripes that are closer to glowing than what I saw in the pcitures here…

Chestnuts roasted by Justine @ 01/24/2004 8:43 AM

hi there,
I found your article to be enjoyable! Althought, I wish your Glofish were more like mine! Mine are very close to the unbelievable pink found on the glofish site. But, I do have more colorfull rocks and such that could add to it. Email me if you want some of my pics for your site or anything. I have had a blast posting pics of them!

Chestnuts roasted by Sarah @ 02/04/2004 12:02 PM

If you’re thinking of getting a salt water tank, make sure it’s at least a twenty gallon. Anything smaller should probably be reserved for quarantine. Best bet for starters would be clowns or damsels, both of which are fairly durable. They’ll ‘cycle’ your tank, and they aren’t that expensive. Some damsels will sell from three to ten bucks, and the clowns will typically run fifteen bucks for ocelaris clowns, and like, thirty or more for true perculas.

Chestnuts roasted by "Wild" Bill @ 02/07/2004 9:28 AM

If you’re thinking of getting a salt water tank, make sure it’s at least a twenty gallon. Anything smaller should probably be reserved for quarantine. Best bet for starters would be clowns or damsels, both of which are fairly durable. They’ll ‘cycle’ your tank, and they aren’t that expensive. Some damsels will sell from three to ten bucks, and the clowns will typically run fifteen bucks for ocelaris clowns, and like, thirty or more for true perculas.

Chestnuts roasted by "Wild" Bill @ 02/07/2004 9:28 AM

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2004 at 12:40 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.