I don’t normally get choked-up over goldfish dying. But I’ll admit when a dozen or so tropical fish went belly up at the University of Maine’s Aquaculture Research facility, it nearly brought a tear to my eye.

The victims were in fact not gold, but bright red, blue-striped angel fish. They represented months of hard work by Soren Hansen and Chad Callan, entrepreneurs and grad students in the university’s School of Marine Sciences.

Hansen and Callan are both working toward doctoral degrees while attempting to establish a business that breeds valuable saltwater tropical fish – called marine ornamentals – for the home aquarium trade. (Their project was the subject of an earlier Tracking Maine Business column, published Aug. 3, 2004.)

The enterprise focuses on three marketable families: clown fish, dotty backs and angel fish. The first two can be raised in captivity. The industry has found captive breeding of the more valuable angels, however, more elusive. The fish continue to be captured at sea through methods that often destroy natural coral reef habitats. Callan and Hansen believe if they can determine the fish’s nutritional needs and domesticate their breeding, they can help preserve reef ecosystems while cornering a piece of an estimated $250 million market.

To demystify the angel fish, Hansen aims to identify, develop and monitor the success of live food sources for the angels during their crucial, almost microscopic larval stage. Callan plans to study effects of the nutritional status of the breeding pairs upon fertility and upon birth and survival rates of the young.

The dotty backs and clown fish will provide the university with a continuing research stock and will also be sold to help support the operation. The plan progressed steadily through the beginning of the summer: The angel fish had begun to spawn, and the bulk of Callan and Hansen’s research seemed about to get underway.

Then, a quiet disaster.

In the course of a single day, the angels began breathing in spasms, hovering strangely near the top of their tanks. Something had changed in the artificial sea water environment.

The researchers knew every square inch of the elaborate system they had built to filter, aerate, monitor and maintain the fish’s 1,500-gallon environment. They checked everything they knew to test for: temperature, salinity, oxygen and chemicals. Everything showed normal.

Callan and Hansen purged the system’s sea water again and again, moving always in methodical steps. The angels, now in separate tanks, were still ill and dying. The clown fish and dotty backs also began to deteriorate, their reproduction failing. Weeks passed and a year of preparation was slipping away. The researchers finally sent water samples to the university’s Sawyer Environmental Research Lab to test for every imaginable problem.

Only one abnormal reading returned: copper – and it was off the charts.

The team drained the system and sifted through the bed of crushed coral. What they found were a few, short strands of corroded wire, nipped from the ends of electrical lines when some unrelated work had been done in the room. An innocent mistake with devastating results.

As a solution, Hansen and Callan built a new, entirely separate water supply and filtration system for their fresh batch of angel fish (one of the original dozen survived, but cannot reproduce). They continue to flush the main system, where copper leached deep into the walls of tanks and pipes. Guidelines now call for careful supervision of all future work performed in the research area.

It was a pricey lesson, one that could have crushed an unaided, start-up business. Instead, the setback demonstrates the value of business incubators. And it shows academia itself is learning, finding ways to expose future business leaders to hard knocks while allowing innovative concepts to survive.