Early Aquascraper Findings
It’s been a few weeks since my aquascraper has been running with consistency. With that I’ve been able to put up a front end and display some of that data with the JavaScript library d3. A constantly changing prototype can be found at https://github.com/nodes777/aquadisplay
When you load the page, the previous day’s sales are displayed. The first graph is the average sales of all the kinds of fish. There are 43 types as defined by aquabid, and if no sales in that category were made, then that category is absent. This updates each day, and I will be implementing a control to view previous days, and a line graph of the change over time.
But just from this simple bar graph there’s some interesting things to be found. Like why is the average price of a pleco $200??
Plecos are those sucker mouth catfish that under-informed Petco employees will tell you will eat all the algae in your tank. They do eat algae, but not at any rate that would clear your tank of algae. Despite being marketed as “Algae Eaters” they really need another source of food. And since many of them can get quite large, they’ll often make the tank dirtier by contributing to the bioload of the tank.
The average of $200 in one day was pretty shocking, but what was more shocking, was that the high that day was $1000! By scrolling down I display each fish category’s individual sales data.
I went back to double check the actual aquabid site, and sure enough, there’s the confirmation page. At first I thought someone had fat fingered their bid, but there’s another pleco sale for $550 and another $1200. This species seems to stay small, at around three to four inches (compared to the foot and a half for the common, pleco Hypostomus plecostomus) and often needs to be caught wild, so that might explain some of the price hike.
For me, this is super exciting! This is my jam and exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to find by making this project.
Soon I’m hoping to implement fancier graphics and a better method for displaying individual fish data (rendering 40 graphs at once actually takes a second to paint). After that, I’ll be adding a line graph for each fish types sales over time. And eventually, a weird little stock market game where you buy and sell “stocks” of category’s of fish each day.
