Photo by Faucon
Honestly, I never meant to kill them all.
I’m talking about fish, of course.
If you’re new to this blog, you may not know that I occasionally report on my fish keeping adventures. I don’t own fish myself. But for reasons I won’t bore you with, the library I manage has a fish tank, and I care for it.
There are challenges. For one thing, the local water is highly alkaline, resistant to any pH altering treatment, so a lot of fish just don’t like it, and express their disapproval through dying.
But over the years I’ve found a couple of species that do well. One is the Harlequin Rasbora, and the other, discovered more recently, has been the Tiger Barb. Both varieties seemed to do fine with the water (does their orange coloring have anything to do with it? Probably not), and I do my part by keeping the aquarium clean and the fish food coming.
But on Tuesday morning I goofed up. One of the frustrations of keeping fish is measuring out fish food. The containers come with little sliding apertures, and you open them as far as you consider prudent, then pour. Sometimes you get a lot less than you expected, and you have to shake the container. Sometimes you get a lot more than you intended.
That was what happened Tuesday. I immediately grabbed the net and and tried to fish the food out. But apparently I didn’t get enough.
Because the Tiger Barbs did what Tiger Barbs do (apparently the Rasboras are more prudent), and ate themselves to death. At the end of the day, I’d already flushed one Barb, and another was looking peaked.
This morning every single Tiger Barb was belly up. Every single one. Leaving the Rasboras (all of them) and the one other fish that was there when I came, which I’ve never actually identified, to survive.
I’ll get some more Tiger Barbs. They seem to do pretty well, when I’m on my game.
I’m just working on what level of shame and guilt I should feel.
I mean, I sometimes went fishing when I was a kid, and killed fish on purpose.
One of daughters has had two fish. The goldfish died quickly, but the beta remained for a few months. I may have killed it by cleaning its bowl poorly. I’m not sure. It was sad to let Independence the fish go. But now we have a cat.
This is a hard fact that all fish care-takers must come to terms with: Fish die.
Some die quickly, within moments of you dumping them from the plastic bag you brought them home in into a pristine tank with nicely oxygenated, crystal-clear, perfectly pH-balanced water.
Some die slowly, surviving even the funkiest tank conditions, in water so murky and foul-smelling that you wonder that the EPA has not intervened.
But eventually, they all succumb to something: bad water, overeating, no oxygen, heat, cold, the disdain of their tank mates that their coloration isn’t quite as vivid as the others in the school.
Phil, I’m reasonably sure we’re not going to get a cat in the library. In fact, I’m quite confident of that.
I hate fish. They die so fast you can’t even enjoy them. The only ones that stick around are the ones you learn not to care about; the longest-lived will be the ones you don’t even like. If you can arrange for them to be actively harmful to you, they’ll live forever.
Fortunately, my wife has an excellent record in this regard. She asked me once while I was in Iraq if she could have a fish tank to keep her spirits up. I said, “Yes, of course.” When I got the bill, she’d spent a thousand dollars on it. Somehow that wasn’t made quite clear to me beforehand.
For that reason, we’ve got some African fish who are getting long in the tooth. Now that her cats have died, I mean: they used to hunt the things de profundis, so that I’d find their chewed-up remains on the carpet.
I hate fish.
Thankgs, Grim, for making me feel better about my own fish husbandry.