Frank has at least three identities.
During the day, he was Chen Min, an electrical engineer at the East China Electric Power Design Institute, giving the power plant design drawings, nine to five. After work, he was the father of his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, reading picture books to her until she fell asleep. After 22:00, he became 34-year-old self, the owner of twelve fish tanks, a weekly customer who bought sea creatures from fish farms across the country, and a popular person @ Aquaman Frank who photographed Douyin every night.
Twelve fish tanks are his own underwater world. There are eight or nine small sharks in the fish tank, such as dog sharks, cat sharks, as well as Japanese steamed crabs, small gobies, sea dragons, moray eels, all kinds of eels... He collects the fish from all over the country, and some ornamental fish are imported from Indonesia, the Philippines and the United States.
Frank moved the "Museum of Marine Biology" to Douyin
From "going to the sea" in 2014, Frank has been raising fish for 7 years. On October 29, 2018, the first vibrato was released, and he began to put the matter of fish farming on the screen of his mobile phone. Today, nearly 700 videos of marine life are the mobile oceanographic museum he built. Every day, more than 2 million fans from all over the country watch him raise fish and urge him to change. His latest video is of a "lightning bolt"—a lightning bolt, also known as a flame shell.
The most inconspicuous crab in the sea world
On April 12 this year, while cleaning the fish tank, Frank found a meat ball near the square crab with eight broken legs and two pincers gone. This type of crab is very common in the southern waters of our country, only the size of a dollar coin. It was originally Frank's feed for the white dog shark, and its abdomen was also cut open, and it did not expect to escape death, and there was weak breathing.
That night, Frank spent ten minutes filming a video to the effect that I found a crab with all its legs broken, and I decided to raise it to see if the crab could finally shell it. He named it "Crab Strong". Unexpectedly, after sleeping, this video has been played six or seven million times. The crab is strong and on fire.
In the video, the crab's two strong eyes are rolling round, but there are no hands and feet, and it is impossible to turn its body. However, Frank found that some granulation had grown at the broken leg of the little crab. "It's a raw desire." Netizens asked him, can crabs survive strongly? Years of farming experience told him, "Almost nine deaths." ”
The only way to be born again is to shed your shell. Crustaceans are hulled, and the gills and stomach are shelled together. But the crab is strong and has no legs, and there is no support and focus point for shelling. Humans exert external forces to help it peel off, but it is likely to help. Crabs are strong only for themselves, and everything is unknown. Frank could only provide it with a relatively safe environment.
Crabs are strong
Frank's Douyin account is called Aquaman Frank, certified as a marine life science blogger. Before the crab was strong, he photographed many kinds of marine fish, with more than 500,000 fans. After that, he placed the crab strong in a box, fed it different food every day, updated its video every day, and recorded the days before it was reborn.
Crabs have a strong appetite very well. During that time, there happened to be a friend in Shenzhen, who fished for a box of sea fish, and a big brother in Taizhou had some ultra-low temperature frozen seafood, which was mailed to Frank. "Only when you have enough to eat can you have the strength to live." Frank feeds crabs strong shrimp crabs and other foods every day. Wild shrimp, more than a dozen pounds of yellow amberjack, high-backed big-eyed seabream larger than a plate, Japanese sac shrimp with a small arm... Although it has no legs and does not know whether it can survive, it has eaten a delicacy that it could not eat in its lifetime.
Once, when the shrimp it ate was snatched away by other fish, Frank said to crab strongly: "The Sailor King's Shi Ping once said, don't always count what you have lost, if you lose it, you will lose, think about what you have left." "It's like comforting an old friend.
Careful netizens found that the crab's strong legs grew day by day, and the shell turned green, which was the growth of algae caused by light. Crab Strong's Douyin account for Frank has risen by more than 1 million followers, and now more than 2.35 million people follow Frank. This most ordinary and inconspicuous crab in the ocean world has received hundreds of millions of attention.
Crab Strong Rebirth Story Serial
During the May Day holiday, Frank returned to his hometown in Nanchang to visit his grandmother, and he expected that the crab might molt in those days. For crabs, molting is like passing through a ghost door, and the failure of molting also means the end of life. In order to make the crab strong and safe molting, before leaving, he laid sand under its fish tank to increase friction, and installed black isolation plates on three sides to protect it from outside interference.
On May 5, Frank returns home and sees his unexpected scene, the crab molting successfully and lying in the corner. The crab behind the molt is no different from a normal crab, and its legs are fully grown again, and Frank can't hide his excitement and shouts, "It's reborn!" All its legs have grown back! ”
The name of the video is "The Story of Crab Strong Ends.". By the time the crab was strong and molted successfully, Frank made 23 videos for it. The story of crab strength has touched many people, and some netizens left a message: "I really didn't expect to pay attention to the life of a crab all the time, and I wanted to cry at the end." "Be as strong as a crab, full of hope and yearning for life."
After being reborn, Frank fed it his first shrimp. The moment the crab saw the shrimp, it hugged it with pliers. Frank sighed, "He shouldn't have tried to eat with two pliers in a long time." "Like Luffy in the Voyager King, crabs are strong and cannot be defeated."
Frank's underwater world
Frank grew up on the Ganjiang River in Jiangxi Province, and has loved to raise fish since he was a child. In 2010, he settled in Shanghai, initially playing with freshwater fish. In 2014, he came across marine fish and found that the fish in the sea were too abundant, varied, colorful, and not very expensive, and Frank began to "go to the sea".
How much do you like fish? Before marriage, every month he was paid a salary, and he would add a cylinder to reward himself. The TV was thrown away, and in the rented house, the TV tables and beds were full of fish tanks. After marriage, he owned three bedrooms and a living room, opened up the master bedroom bathroom of the room, and placed a dozen fish tanks. Even on his desk, there is a small fish tank.
Each cylinder is a relatively independent system. Buy a bare tank from the flower and bird market, put in salt to simulate seawater, buy bottom sand in a hardware store, filter filtration, hang a protein separator next to it, nitrify bacteria, and raise water for 15 to 30 days before you can release organisms.
Seawater tanks and freshwater tanks, Frank made. "The essence is all about raising water." A nitrification system is set up for each cylinder. Nitrifying bacteria keep the system in balance, and raising all kinds of fish, shrimp and crabs is no problem. Now, he has dozens of species of fish, shrimp and crabs in his fish tank. The largest fish tank is 1 meter 2 and the smallest is 45 centimeters.
Frank photographs marine fish
Frank likes fish that swim particularly fast, or fish that inhabit the water and are immobile and have special behaviors, "usually lying there you can't see that it is a fish without poking it." For example, the shrew, the commodity name is five-legged tiger, can walk with its feet. Its pectoral fins, like its hands, can float on stones or aquatic weeds, and it has a fishing rod on its head, and when it sees a fish, it will use the rod to lure the fish over and swallow it in one bite.
After having Douyin, these strange fish behavior awards were included in his short videos. In 2018, he just started shooting vibrato, he could only shoot 15 seconds, and the video was very simple, that is, the material was matched with music, and only a few hundred people paid attention. Later, he began to shoot videos of more than a minute, and with the explanation of the voiceover, several videos went out of the circle.
For example, he filmed a "Death of a Flame Squid", which tells that the flame squid he raised suddenly vomited ink one afternoon, and his body became miserable white, colorless, and lifeless. "I knew that day had finally come." Through this video, Frank and netizens popularized a little knowledge about the death of the squid. "The lifespan of squid is generally very short, especially small squid, which has a lifespan of only one to two years."
Situations like the sudden violent death of a flame squid occasionally occur. There was a plum shark that came to his house half a year ago, with brown markings on its body, sometimes lying down and pretending to die, and when it encountered delicious food, it would be eaten in one bite. At first it was only 10 centimeters, but the appetite was good, eating a few small black shrimp every day. Growing to more than 20 centimeters, it can eat several large shrimp in one bite.
Frank recalled in TikTok that usually, it liked to lie dormant in the sand. Sometimes when you can't wake up, you won't eat the shrimp until you bring it to your mouth. Crabs in the same tank came to grab food and it was indifferent. And once you wake up and smell the shrimp, it will feast. After work on November 4, the plum shark, which had been in captivity for half a year, turned over and did not move. "It's been a long time since it's been lying like this."
It's dead. He put it in the refrigerator and refrigerated it, making specimens for friends who do popular science. "Baby sharks are very vulnerable. My stomach was very swollen, and I suspected that I had gastroenteritis by eating something unclean in the tank. Frank recorded his death in TikTok.
When encountering a favorite fish that dies violently, refrigeration is more like a "mummified" retention, as if it also freezes the sadness of the fish's death. After a long time, the sad mood fades. When encountering the rebirth of fish and the shelling of crustaceans, he will also scream with excitement. The living dead sea creatures, he is included in a short video, with the explanation, such as a number of family treasures.
Museum of Mobile Marine Life in Frank TikTok
In this way, in Frank's short video, there is the process of tadpoles growing into toads, there are sharks watching Pippi shrimp eat shrimp, digging pits to hide their domestic squid, pregnant glass shrimp that have eaten their heads and stomachs, small sharks that emerge from their egg sheaths, and crabs that are tenaciously reborn from the line of death. These shrimp and crab fish are Frank's underwater world.
For a long time, friends were surprised to see Frank's traffic, "Why do you insist on this traffic?" Frank said, "If it's a hobby, it's good to stick to, and if it involves money, it's really not necessarily good to stick to." After the crab strong appeared, Frank's vibrato really became a million-level science big.
What is the use of "useless"
After a long time in the "Sea Fish" circle, Frank became acquainted with a fish merchant. When encountering an unknown fish, the merchant will ask him to identify it. Because of this, he was able to come into contact with rarer fish. In the first few years after graduation, he often went to Qingdao and Hainan to collect wild fish by the sea, and traveled thousands of miles to bring back his favorite fish. Until now, he has maintained the habit of buying fish every week.
Frank and friends in Qingdao
Asked what the figure is. Frank was surprised, "Like what else needs to be done?" Love doesn't need a reason, it just likes. "It's hard to say that Frank came to fish like a short or golden retriever, and he already had a dozen fish tanks and hundreds of fish. The simple, just out of liking and not being able to suppress the urge to share, infects many people around and off-screen.
Raising sea creatures gives Frank fun in observation and discovery, a kind of self-expression of complete randomness. For example, if you shoot an octopus today, let's talk about the characteristics of this octopus. Tomorrow shoot Wenchang fish, on how to protect the living fossils under the science popularization. The day after tomorrow, when talking about crab slaves, it is explained that crabs have such parasites, which is equivalent to zombies being out of control.
"I know something that many people probably don't know, but saying it out will make more people know." Talk about something that doesn't look useful and sounds interesting, and Frank will feel accomplished. For example, sharks are generally divided into oviparous and oviparous, some can directly give birth to small sharks, and some are hatched from shark eggs. "It's something that most people don't see in their lives."
These videos may make parents and children no longer just watch a hilarity when they go to the aquarium. The fragmented knowledge in the video, in addition to Frank's personal accumulation, is the marine biology book that "going to the sea" has been buying for seven years. "The United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan all have them, and if you encounter something you haven't seen before, you can check the atlas, and even check the latest research papers at home and abroad."
Frank discovered that the fish's memory was not only seven seconds. Fish have a long-term memory. The octopus was cooked, and as soon as he entered the door, he stretched out his brachiopods to eat. Frank had raised a pair of fish of different species. One day, one of the sawn-eyed seabream died, and the other heteroporous perch surrounded it for six or seven hours, drilling under it, trying to lift it up.
This behavior Frank first observed, and while casual observations don't prove anything, it raises the possibility that fish not only have long-term memory, but fairly high IQs, and that they are likely to have complex feelings that humans currently can't prove their existence.
The BBC has photographed a pigtooth fish, it will hold the shell to the stone, smash and eat, which is a very high IQ. "Human knowledge of the ocean is very limited, and the current conclusions are based on current cognition, and some of the current seem to be correct, and in decades or even hundreds of years, they are not necessarily so correct." Frank said.
Monochrome snapper
Fish farming, like raising babies, will encounter sick situations. The swimming posture is not right, there are red spots on the body, weight loss, festering on the body, etc., "A look at this fish seems to be cooking, that is, where is the problem." Frank checked the fish for big and small injuries every day. In several videos, he specifically removes parasites from fish. The shrunken-headed fish lice burrow into the mouth of the fish, replacing the fish's tongue. He pulled out the fish lice with electric gas-tipped tweezers.
He said that domestic knowledge about marine life is scarce. What are the habits of fish? What does it do when it's courting? What kind of action will there be? Some fish will emit a beautiful marriage color, under what circumstances will it emit this marriage color? What stimulates? Temperature or food? "We have done a lot of research on economic fish, but almost no research on ornamental fish."
In addition, Frank "went to the sea" for seven years and found fish in some places from there to none. Whether it is artificial destruction such as pesticides or the deterioration of the overall ecological environment, some species are constantly disappearing. TikTok has allowed him to meet a lot of aquarists. Two or three years ago, a fan named Aite asked what kind of fish it was and what kind of animal it was. Now, there are more and more problems, and there is no way back.
However, Frank will take time every day to try to respond to various questions from netizens. "The more society develops, the stronger the demand for the natural sciences." Frank likened his Vibrato video to a "nature education lesson", "let everyone know that there are such marine creatures, have seen, learned, have a very deep memory of this species, in the future in case some species are endangered, those children who have watched his videos may grow up to find ways to protect them." 」 ”
He knows that fans prefer to watch videos with stories. Today, the crab has not only survived, but also shed its shell two or three times, no different from a normal crab. He's still trying to shoot all sorts of TikTok videos with bits and pieces of knowledge, and in addition to liking fish, he also wants to tell people who follow him, "Sea creatures don't live to bring anything to humans, not to serve humans." The value cannot be judged solely by what benefit it will bring to humanity. Frank said.