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Awesome magician controls goldfish

We stumbled on this video and it was too cool not to share.

In it, a Chinese magician "charms" six goldfish to swim in unison on a live television show watched by millions.

But Lu Yandong's mesmerising performance on Central China Television's 2011 Lunar New Year's eve show irked animal rights activists, who claimed that the fishes were mistreated in the act. 

Activists were worried fishes would be harmed while others try to replicate the trick. 

Mr Lu debunked popular theories on how the trick was done, including the use of magnets, fishing lines from the ceiling, or that the fishes were not real and are robots or holographic projections instead.

He said that among other difficulties, using magnets might make the fishes stick together and the trick to fail. 

"Magic is fake. There was definitely some trickery involved behind the audience's back, but animals are a magician's best friend - I would never hurt them," he said in an interview with a Chinese paper shortly after the show. 

"Everyone knows magic is something that is not real, so to make wild conjectures about how it is done or worse still, ask the magician to reveal his secret, would be wrong."

"Our job as an audience is to appreciate."

Mr Lu comes from a famous family of magicians in China. His father Fu Tenglong was known as China's "King of Magic".

In another new year show in 2012, Mr Lu faced further criticism when he failed to get "golden" ladybugs to line up in the shape of the number 12. 

He later apologised on his Weibo account and said that it was a problem with his props that caused the mishap. 

Source: YouTube, Baidu

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