Comet, the Pomerleau family pet, can soar through hoops, squirm beneath a lowered limbo bar and chase after a soccer ball.
Not impressed? Comet isn't a dog, he's a goldfish.
Dean Pomerleau of Gibsonia has fielded news media requests after his "Fish School Training Kit" debuted for sale recently on Amazon.com for $29.99. The multi-piece kit comes with a mini soccer and football field, tunnel, hoop and instructional DVD.
"My kids always wanted a dog, but my wife and I were reluctant to get one, so we tried to satisfy their hunger for a pet using alternatives," said Pomerleau, a former Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor.
"One of our attempts was fish, but as everyone knows, fish are boring pets," he said. "I thought, well, what if we could teach them to do tricks? So we tinkered around and actually developed a lot of techniques and tools that really made it possible to train our fish."
Comet and his companion fish, Brainiac, are fast becoming YouTube sensations. They perform on the Web daily about 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
"The response has been amazing. Our YouTube video is at 130,000 hits right now," Russell Ronat, whose Los Angeles company R2 Solutions manufactures and markets the training kit, said Tuesday afternoon.
Pomerleau said his fish are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where The Daily Telegraph recently compared Comet to soccer star David Beckham.
Training the fish works much the same as training a dog with positive reinforcement. Each kit includes a "wand" that releases a small piece of fish food. Once the fish learns that following the wand yields food, it can be taught tricks.
Comet, a standard goldfish, could perform a full repertoire of tricks after an hour of training once a day for two months.
Reviews of the training kit on Amazon.com are resoundingly positive. Among the user comments: "Pure genius," "Great for kids -- educational and fun" and "Terrific set of fish training gear!"
Pomerleau's day job is creating collision-avoidance technology for Cognex, a Carnegie Mellon spinoff he founded. Despite the early success of his fish training kit, he doesn't expect to become a full-time fish trainer.
He has yet to solve the problem that led him to invent the kit in the first place.
"My son is pretty happy with the fish," he said. "But my daughter still really wants a dog."
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