Friday, August 15, 2008

Fish

Over a year ago now, we had to take Osagi (our rabbit) out to Hye Sook's parents' house. He was just shedding too much and clogged up our computer and microwave with fur, causing the computer to overheat and the microwave to sputter and almost start a fire. He lives happily there, and we still see him regularly.

Soon after he left, we decided to get some simpler pets. We got fish. At first, we got five, but almost right away two died, leaving only the two sucker fish and a shiny silver fish. We decided to buy more and settled on getting one larger fish instead of several small ones. The big fish that we took home attacked the other fish despite the insistance from the store owner that it wouldn't. We took the fish back, and the owner insisted that we take several small fish in exchange, bringing our total up to 11. I didn't want 11 fish, but the owner was very insistant.

Almost as soon as we got home, two died. Over the next several days, one would die every day or so. We asked the shop owner about it, and she insisted we were doing everything right. Before we new it, we were back down to the two sucker fish and a blue tropical fish, and that's the way it stayed for months. Soon before we moved, the blue fish got a disease and bloated up. It stopped eating. We looked the disease up online. It said we needed a certain medicine to take care of it, but we never found it. He was dead within a week. We had had such bad luck with fish at that point, that we just kept the sucker fish for a month or so. They were survivors.

A week or two back, we were at the store, and we passed by the fish section. They had a cool new fish, and we decided to get it and picked up a couple snails when we did. The fish turned out to be a sturgeon, of all things. It was extremely hyper. It never stopped swimming and would go absolutely crazy when I fed the fish. But, like all of our fish, it's days were numbered.

Last week I was sitting on the couch reading when I heard some splashing in the tank. I didn't think much of it, since the sturgeon was so hyper and did weird stuff fairly regularly. Later, I got up to get a glass of water and glanced in the tank to see the sturgeon twisted and floating lifeless at the bottom of the tank. It had been fine minutes earlier, so it's hard to say what happened exactly, but I have some theories.

1) The sucker fish weren't too fond of the sturgeon. Whenever he came close, they flicked up their fins and looked aggressive. Maybe he came a little too close and one of them took him out.

2) When I found him, he was down in some of the plastic plants at the bottom of the tank. He had little hook things around his mouth, and maybe they got stuck in the plant, causing him to trash around and kill himself.

Who know?

Regardless, here are some pictures of the remaining animals in the tank: two sucker fish and two snails.

R

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home