I was about 100 meters out from the coast in waist deep water. I was on a lovely sandy bay that was shallow for a long distance out to sea. I was collecting shrimp, snails, starfish and other things for my tanks when I noticed this black shadow moving along the coast near the shore. I thought it might have been a shark but didn't worry too much about it.
Over the next 30 minutes or so the black shadow went up and down the coastline slowly moving out into deeper water, where I was. Eventually it came towards me and stopped 2 feet in front of me. It lifted its head just out of the water and looked at me for a minute or so. I stood there and looked back. Then it swam off, continuing its search for food.
It was a stingray about 4 feet across. It was going up and down the bay looking for food and decided to stop by and check me out. That was a really cool experience and certainly one of my memorable moments.
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Another time I was down south looking for fish in a freshwater pond. I was after an endangered species called the Salamanderfish (Lepidogalaxias salamandroides). I was using a hand made net that was about 2 feet long x 18 inches wide and 6 inches deep.
I scooped the net in and it felt heavy coming up. I saw this beautiful salamanderfish in the net and it was big, much bigger than normal (about 7cm). They are normally half that size.
Also in the net was a huge black marron (freshwater crayfish). The people I was with said wow, look at the size of that marron, grab it for dinner. The marron was about 18 inches long (not including the claws) and it felt something moving about under its feet. It grabbed the salamanderfish and ate it. I freaked and grabbed the marron and was about to give it to my friends to put in a bucket when I noticed it was berried (had eggs under the tail). I put her back in the water with her meal, my salamanderfish.
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We had a customer come in with some wild caught rainbowfish they had brought down from up north. We thought they looked interesting and put them in a tank. This is before rainbowfish became common.
The following day they were all dead so we drained the tank and refilled it, then put a pair of Oscars in the tank. A week later the tank was full of baby fish and the boss was running around saying the Oscars had babies.
They weren't baby Oscars. They were baby rainbows. Rainbowfish and a few other species will sometimes breed just before they die. This is a survival strategy for when the water ways dry up and turn into hot little mud puddles. The adult fish spawn and hope some of the eggs hatch and keep the species going. That is what happened. The adult fish were stressed from spending a week in a hot car driving half way across the country and when they were put into a clean tank, they just spawned everywhere and a week later there were thousands of baby fish in the tank.
