CASE STUDY 1: CATHERINE BETTA-JONES

Durand resident Rick Gladwin has always enjoyed growing things, so his partner Krista thought a water garden — a miniature aquaponics system available online — seemed like a good gift. The system incorporates six small growing pots on top of a fish tank and is designed for a betta fish to live inside. Gladwin named his new pet Catherine Betta-Jones. He grew sprouts, wheat grass and other fast-growing greens, but quickly found that keeping the tank in balance was easier said than done. If he left the sprouts too long, their growth slowed and they stopped absorbing as many nutrients, so the tank would get dirty. He was spending much more time cleaning it out than he had anticipated. It was one such cleaning that spelled the beginning of the end of Catherine Betta-Jones and Gladwin’s experiment. “I finished cleaning the tank and he was floating at the top of his little side tank,” Gladwin, 38, said woefully. “I was like, ‘Oh God!’ I gave him a poke and he started swimming (but) he wasn’t the same after that. He was kind of weird.” Catherine Betta-Jones had suffered organ damage from temperature shock. Gladwin eventually put the fish out of its misery by adding clove oil to its water, a tip he learned from a friend who worked at an aquarium store. As a sensitive animal-lover who’d gotten attached to the little creature, it was an unsettling experience that he decided against repeating. “If I’m just planting a garden, it doesn’t come with the health of an animal attached,” he said. “The experiment is fun and super-interesting, keeping an ecosystem in balance and learning about all the components, but in the end, there’s also a little being swimming around in there.”