When helpless fish need a hero, she answers the call
Construction workers have been at work demolishing an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Queens, New York, over the past several months, dismantling the long-empty wards and carting off the bricks. But first, they had to figure out what to do with a school of goldfish that for unknown reasons had come to call the flooded basement home. Three hundred of them.
Their go-to goldfish rescuer? A beautician from the Bronx.
Brenda Prohaska, who teaches cosmetology at an alternative learning high school, had only a passing interest in fish when she joined a local aquarium interest group a few years ago. She just had some questions about how to treat ich, an illness that had wiped out her mollies. Then the pandemic lockdown began, and the fish club became a fish 911.
Messages poured in: There were sultan fish languishing in a closed acupuncture office in midtown Manhattan, a cluster of spike-topped apple snails forfeited by a Bronx family fleeing the contagion, and a nearly 20-yearold oscar fish in Co-Op City whose owner had died of the coronavirus.
“I thought someone else would answer the call,” Prohaska, 51, said in an interview in her house on City Island in the Bronx, over the burble of hundreds of gallons of aquarium water. Beside her, the foot-long sultan fish from the acupuncture office chewed a fresh earthworm she had plopped in his tank. “They didn't, so I had to.”
Prohaska has since taken up a heavy mantle few — including herself — knew was there for the taking: She has become the city's on-call fish rescuer.
The pandemic has ebbed, but Prohaska has not stopped. The fish need her too much, she said. The volume may be related to a post-pandemic phenomenon:
giving away pets that were purchased as a lockdown balm. Small-animal intakes spiked by more than 12% nationwide in 2022, compared with the year before, according to Shelter Animals Count, which collects data from more than 6,000 shelters, though they still remain about 9% lower than before the pandemic.
Prohaska has a hard time explaining why the plight of helpless fish called to her. A cancer survivor, she said saving them gave her a sense of control, particularly during the pandemic. “I always have been a giver, so it almost comes easy to me,” she said. “They are living things, and I feel like nobody really cares that much.”