As usual, someone more entrepreneurial, more decisive, more certain of themselves, grabbed hold of that kernel of an idea, that nugget of insight and made a bit of cash.
Six years ago, while working in a pet store, I was busy cleaning tanks when a delicate crustacean, a decopod, flitted through the murk of dirty tank water and grasped my submerged hand. Tiny pinchers at the end of long, delicate foot-stalks nimbly maneuvered Lysmata amboinensis toward my fingers. Its thorace, yellow with two red racing stripes, swayed gently in the turbulent water like a commuter on the metro. Slowly, with a set of antennae twice the length of its body, the cleaner shrimp walked to the tip of my fingers and set its tiny claws upon a hangnail. The feeling was like a slight static shock, not uncommon in a room full of salt water and outlets. Then it moved to my cuticles, and finally, with a pair of chelipedic tweezers, grabbed at the grime from under my nails. And it was satisfying. I sat motionless, reveling in my first symbiotic relationship–with an invertebrate, no less!–and mentally arranged ways to have my fingers manicured every time I came to work, and then, how strange it would look when a customers saw an employee standing there with one arm in an tank and a blissful look on his face.
But then pet shops attract strange people. It is a refuge for the pony-tailed or tattooed and goateed male unable or unwilling to work at the Gap–preferring as it were to feed rats to snakes over folding jeans. The customers, mostly other guys, can be generalized as well. There are the shitheads in search of a frat house mascot that eats things. Then the forty-year old virgins who graduated from Dungeons & Dragons to a Bearded Dragon. In an opposing corner are the mulleted, sleeveless, toothless hilljacks who walk in with eight squaking kids, and a wife who remains in the Ford heap idling out front, to complain about the price of rats and then ask if their ten foot Burmese would eat a thawed chicken. Next, the fanatics who smell like the animals they keep, the bird lovers. Lastly, the no-nothing dentists and lawyers who want to recreate that time they went diving in Fiji right in their living room and want it to scale and would like it done this afternoon. This is the price one pays for running a pet shop that is against selling puppies and kittens. There is no further need to encourage a stereotype by engaging in socially awkward behavior with a crustacean.
Of course if I wasn’t the only one doing it…
What saved me from the next logical step all those years ago, the money-making step, was, perhaps, a lack of a business degree. I regret to say that John Ho, who runs the Yvonne Hair and Nails salon has started a trend in the US that’s likely to spread or at least earn him some revenue. The only difference between Ho and I is the difference between a Chordata and a Crustacean. Customers at Ho’s pay to have their feet soak in a tank full of flesh-eating fish. Ho admitted insecurity in regards to the idea , but was recently quoted in an AP article as saying “let’s give it a shot.” In the pat words of the reporter, “customers were quickly hooked.” Why? Because Garra rufa , the “Doctor Fish” as it’s known in Japan, apparently only consume dead or infected skin–like maggots in a gangrenous wound–such as calluses, corns, bunions and hang-nails.
One question: What’s this toe-sucker’s natural dinner time habits, certainly not primate epidermis? The ecology and phylogeny of this Middle-East freshwater fish would make a good follow-up post. Perhaps someone with an eye on evolution and phylogenetics could address it.
In a recent paper out in PLoS Genetics titled Is Mate Choice in Humans MHC-Dependent? (Chaix et al. 2008) the authors use genetic data to see if the MHC locus is more or less similar between spouses than the rest of the genome. Selection of mates on the basis of MHC locus differences is something that’s been shown in a bunch of animal studies, but it’s still unclear how it works in humans. You may have heard of the studies where women who smelled used men’s undershirts preferred the smell of men with different MHC loci, but some studies have provided contradictory results.
