fish

A few weeks ago, I decided I was done with the fish. Pretty much just like that.

It's true I'd been waffling on them pretty much since I moved in here. Eric was right when he told me initially to get a big tank. The smaller tank needed to be cleaned twice as often, and the hang-on-back filter was much noisier than the canister filters that came with the big one. And what I always found so interesting was the interaction between the cichlids, how the hierarchy was formed and maintained. I couldn't have enough fish in this tank for them to do anything interesting.

Hard to let go of them though. I've gotten used to having them around and like the look of the tank on the counter where it is, the big burst of light, shimmery and green and brown.

Then I got home from California to that noise, that goddamn running water

allthetimeallthetime

the moment I walked into the house and heard it, I thought -I'm done.

This afternoon, I posted a note to the local aquarium society - For Free: cichlids, otos, loaches - at 3:30. At 5:30, E.L.K. was in my living room, his cooler half full of tank water, watching me try to catch the squiggly loaches.

It had taken me nearly two weeks to actually post the message. I was hoping for a few days to get used to the idea of them being gone. But I felt a bit foolish telling ELK that I needed time to say goodbye.

Now the filter is unplugged, the tank is dark. I'm mourning, strangely. Though I think I did the right thing, I miss them, the thirty finny slippy gallons of space they took up in my life.

I have spent all of 15 minutes in my new house. Didn’t take any photos. I have a vague recollection of colours I didn’t love and too much too-big furniture. Lots of cupboards and counter space. Hardwood floors. Well-planned closets.

One thing I’m absolutely sure of, however, is that my current 55 g. aquarium will not fit anywhere without becoming an overwhelming piece of too-big furniture.

At first I thought I’d just get rid of it. I’m a little iffy on the amount of electricity and water it uses; I have a hard time justifying the environmental waste. There’s also a certain amount of worry involved with it. Why did the blue-green algae come back? Eeesh, it’s dirty in there, I should really really clean it. But, damn, too late tonight. Oh well, where did the, oh, that poor bedraggled Ram.

And I was okay with not having them. Well, I had to be. It was sad, but I thought I could do it.

Then I bought Otos. I had New Fish Energy for them, started sitting in front of the tank again all the time. Searching for them, worried that they might not acclimatize. They did. They bustle around the tank, happy as bivalves, swimming from dirty spot to dirty spot and suckering all the gunk up like nobody’s business.

I can't give up the fish completely. Got myself on OVAS, found someone selling a 20 g. tank, asked for the measurements, figured it would fit under the cupboards and still leave me more flat surface than I have now, and paid $70 for the whole kit and caboodle.

But first, I need to get my big tank in better order. It’s pretty algae-riffic in there right now. There’s brown spots and green spots, and beardy stuff and hairy stuff, and most frighteningly, the blue-green stuff. The Otos were step 1 and a pretty easy one.

Step two is to set up a CO2 diffuser, which involves the items you see to your right. I left it for a while because I needed to drill a hole in the lid of the pop bottle, poke the tubing through it and seal it up after, and I didn’t have a clamp to hold the lid steady. After a few weeks of trying to figure it out, I just said fuck it and did it fast and with all of my soft bits out of the way.

There’s a small hole in the top stair of my back porch, but other than that, the fuckit plan worked fine, as you can see. The next step, probably tomorrow night or Wednesday, is to get a sugar and yeast mixture into the bottle, seal the whole thing up, and wait a day or two to let the yeast send their anaerobic offerings up the tube and into my plants’ hungry stomata.

When Shelley was here a couple weeks ago, we were in the living room. I remembered I forgot to feed the fish. I'm not obsessed with them anymore, so I don't spend every spare second watching them. And if you forget a feeding here and there, it's actually kind of good for them. Mimics nature, like. Which is about the only thing that mimics nature in that tank.

I opened up the shrimp pellets and was concentrating on breaking them up into smaller pieces while Shelley watched the fish schooling and jostling excitedly in front of me.

"How do you feel about them now?" she asked. "You know, now that Eric..."

That was the gamble, right? I got into fish keeping because of him, at least partially. With some of his encouragement and a lot of his help. I did spend a while thinking about it before jumping in, so I was pretty sure that I was doing it because I wanted to and not to have something in common with my boy. But hearts and minds are funny things, and you just never know.

"Ohhhh. They make me so happy."

I don't spend as much time with them as I would like, but when I do, they fill me with a sense of deep contentment. They just are, you know? They swim, they push each other around, they shit, they beg for food, they eat. It's pretty basic stuff. But there's always something going on in there. The plants change all the time, the fish switch up their favourite spots or who gets to chase who.

What's in there right now (sort of in pecking order):
- 2 Red-Bellied Flags (Dwarf Cichlids), Laetacara thayeri
- 1 Firemouth (Cichlid), Thorichthys meeki
- 2 Kribesnsis (Dwarf Cichlids), Pelvicachromis pulcher
- 2 Bolivian Rams (Dwarf Cichlids), Microgeophagus altispinosa

By rights, the Firemouth should be boss, since in its peer group it's the only non-dwarf. But it's the same size as the dwarf fish, and has been for months. Shows no size of growing. It was absolutely terrorized by the formerly bastard Firemouth now in ex-ile at Eric's. I think that by the time it realized it was no longer being stalked to within an inch of its life, it's position had already been cemented. So it's second fiddle to the Flags, but I have also seen the bigger Krib chase the Firemouth away from a particularly deletable looking bloodworm.

The Rams puzzle me. They are undoubtedly the most pecked. Their fins usually have a tear or two, they never get the shrimp pellets first, and if one of them is chasing another fish, it's another Ram. But they are the most adventurous and playful. They're the only ones brave enough to try to eat my fingers when I put the food in, they playfight kiss, they get themselves right up into the suction tube I use to change the water. They will go where other fish fear to tread. But once everything's back to normal, they're getting nipped again. They are the high school nerds, figuring shit out on their own only to get beat down once they get back to school.

Outside the cichlid group, I have
- 9 cardinal tetras
- 3 khuli loaches
- 1 bristlenose pleco

It is here I have suffered the most losses. I started with 9 khulis, but they don't have scales, so they took the hardest hit in the time of ich. A harlequin tetra snuck in when I bought the cardinals. They tolerated it, but it was always an outsider. Until it was gone. I felt sort of relieved when I realized that. A schooling fish without its own kind is a morose fish.

There are plans, too, you better believe. A few more loaches, a few more cardinal tetras, and a siamese algae eater. And one of these days I'm going to figure out how to make a CO2 diffuser and get my plants all happy too.

I guess I figured right.

And it's been gone a while, but I have been remiss in my fish blogging. As I was saying to Eric on our Very Hot Date last Friday night, now that the tank set-up is done, I've picked my fish, and the fish have settled in pretty well, "you're thinking about getting a new tank," he finished, a kind and knowing smile. "It's called multiple tank syndrome. We've all been there."

Apparently, New Relationship Energy has a pretty short span when you're in love with a fish tank.

There's no gentle way of treating ich. You can buy a bunch of different treatments in the stores - all chemicals, all with a list of ways it would hurt the various things living in your tank. The one I got was copper, and after doing a bit of research, I realized that the copper might kill my loaches. They don't have scales, so they're more sensitive to things like toxins being dumped in the water. And I do like them. They don't have the personality of the cichlids, but every time I see them swimming around, I think "oh, the khulis. scoobilling around. scoobily scoobily." Who wants to kill that kind of contentment?

In the end, I decided to go with heat and salt. Over the course of two days, I raised the temperature up to 88 F, two degrees at a time. I lowered the water level to just below the filter jets to improve aeration.

After a few days, the heat had killed some of the ich on some of the fish, but then the ich on my red-bellied dwarf flags (who are really afraid of the camera, so I can't get a good picture of them, but they're very cute) went bananas.

Out came the salt. Sea salt. 22 tablespoons of it, in two goes, dissolved into a bowl of tank water first and then slowly poured in.

For a little while, the tank was kind of like soup. Not very healthy soup, since the salt wreaked fucking havoc on my plants.

The fish, however, didn't seem to mind too much. They were a little lethargic, but after 5 days, the ich was completely gone, and they'd stopped scratching themselves on the rock, the driftwood, the sand. The plants, on the other hand? They took a fucking beating, and the tank looked like hell.

After another 5 ichless days, it was time to slowly move out of kill-ich mode. Down came the temperature, two degrees at a time. When that was stabilized, I did a 75% water change to get rid of most of the salt. And another, again today, to make sure almost all the salt was gone.

I've heard tales of how awful it was to do water changes in the days before the PYTHONTM. All pails and spills. Not so with the PYTHONTM. You screw it onto your sink at one end and put the other end in the tank. Then you run the water and if the green plastic doohickey at the bottom of the sink end is down, the PYTHONTM creates a vacuum and sucks water out of the tank and if the green plastic doohickey is up, it pushes water down the tube and into the tank. There's a flip switch on a valve about two feet from the non-sink end so that if you have to say, run the exactly 50' from the tank to the sink to warm the water up so it doesn't shock your fish and give them ich again, you can leave the non-sink end on the floor and not soak everything in your living room.

The fish freak out a bit when I first put the PYTHONTM in the tank, but once its been in there and not moving around, the brave fish come over for inspection. The one in that picture there actually got sucked halfway up the tube before I noticed. It's a bolivian ram.

I did a lot more plant pruning while this was all going on, which is how the ram nearly got sucked up, and in the end, my tank looks much cleaner but very bare. I'm a little sad for the fish, who really do enjoy swimming amongst the plants.

Except this one, the Bristlenose Pleco. It's in its usual position, hanging around, upside down, sucking on a coconut hut. And really, if you had the choice, isn't that what you'd be doing too?

This here is a happy kuhli loach, hanging out with a snail.

It it not the kuhli that died two days ago. That was a sad morning. I saved the body and showed it to Eric, My Fish Mentor. It had white spots on it. "Eesh," he said. "Ich."

But kuhlis are a kind of fish that don't have scales. "Maybe they're not white spots," I said.

"Yeah, maybe it just scraped itself. But keep an eye on your cichlids. If you see a spot on one of those, you need to treat."

This morning, there were spots on my ciclids. My firemouths, to be more precise. I have two firemouths (Thorichthys meeki). Pictured at left is the bastard firemouth, so called because until I changed the rocks up in the tank and got some driftwood, it bullied the other fish all to hell and was totally stressing the corner firemouth, so called because while he was being bullied he pretty much lived cowering in the corner, in the half inch behind the heater, treading water, snout down.

The bastard firemouth was a true bully, because as soon as I put my hand in there, he'd head for the hills. And he wouldn't come out until the hand left. But when the hand left? He renewed his attack on all the other fishes with extra piss and vinegar, nipping and butting and chasing like nobody's business.

I had pictured a kind of lazy Sunday morning, maybe grabbing a paper and heading over to Bramasole for breakfast. Instead, I inspected all the other fish, tested my parameters, read the instructions for the ich treatment I'd bought just in case, and then consulted with My Other Fish Mentor, Internet.

Ich, for those of you who don't know, is a parasite. The hotter the temperature, the faster the life cycle of the parasite. That is, until you hit 86F, at which point the heat kills the ich altogehter. At least that's what Internet said.

Instead of dumping chemicals in my tank, I did a 25% water change, which involves a contraption called a Python, lar lar. I vacuumed the gravel, replacing the ich filled 25% with a slightly warmer non-ichy 20%.

I've never had more than one pet at a time, and I'm feeling a little bad for Freya. I have total new relationship energy for my tank.

It's pretty much all I think about. I dream about it every night. I make breakfast, I eat it in front of the tank. I make dinner, I eat it in front of the tank. I find my fish endlessly fascinating. When people ask me how I'm doing I say, "The tank's looking great."

A few months after I got Wolf Parade's last album, I had listened to it so often I was a little sick of it, but felt compelled to listen to it anyway, just always one more time. Eventually, I just put it away because I didn't want to stop enjoying it.

I may have to find a way to do that with a 4-foot tank full of living beings.

My physical surroundings have been in an uproar for the better part of 2 weeks, and this is the reason why. It is a 55 gallon aquarium with two canister filters and a sand substrate.

If you want to kill the better part of a Saturday, I suggest you buy a used aquarium. When Eric and I got out to Gatineau last weekend, the previous owner had only gotten half way through tearing it down.

"Takes a bit longer than I remembered," he said sheepishly. I admired his girlfriend's shoes (though no gf was apparent they were definitely not his style), Eric and I admired his other tank of African cichlids, and then we started trucking the pieces we could out to the car loaned to us by the very kind Grace and Greg.

I was incredibly naive about the whole process. I didn't think there would be nearly as many bits as there were and 50 to 60 lbs of rocks sounds like a lot, but sounds like less than they feel. And then the stand. I was really hoping not to take it, because particle board makes me despair a little bit, but the filters are quite large, and while the stand kind of disappears, the filters would definitely never, not ever.

After carting all the stuff in, and heading back out to the 'burbs to Big Al's Fish Emporium, we finally made it back, late, to eat dinner down the street with Team KGRF, after which the plan was to go home, quickly set up the tank and buzz on over to the Divergence Movie Night fundraiser.

A beer and a glass of wine into dinner, I knew there was no way I was going to make it over the bridge. Dinner stretched into a much needed tea, stretched into 9:30 and I had an aquarium to set up. And besides a few minutes explanation from the previous owner and some common sense, I didn't really know what I was doing.

Luckily, I got a few tips from Eric before I started, and am reasonably mechanically inclined. It all came together fairly easily, with only one near disaster, when I wasn't paying enough attention to the water level and I almost overfilled the tank. And then I couldn't get the Python contraption attached to my kitchen tap to suck the water out like it was supposed to suck water out and I was tired and a little hung over and getting frustrated and running the exactly 50 feet from my sink to my tank in high dudgeon.

Since there was no actual spillage, I'd classify that as an irritation. I was insanely gratified when I got to Eric's only an hour and a half after starting and he said "You're already done? Shit."

Right now, I have no fish and I have no plants. But I do have snails. Hundreds of them. And they love my coconut huts.

Eric threw a party last night and I had a really fun time. There were turntables, and the night had been split up into half hour slots with a different DJ for each slot. A couple people cancelled, so Eric filled in a couple spots, but Mark and Jennifer and Aurele and Bill all stepped up to the plate (the decks?) as well.

There was talking and laughing and dancing and eating and drinking.

Too much drinking on my part, cause now I got the oog.

I just got home from Eric's, where he is in bed with the oog. I'm going to finish blogging, do some dishes and make some pancakes, which will hopefully do their job of soaking the oog up.

Fish Watch

The fry that Tracie's kribensis had are almost all gone now. Eric thought they were totally gone, but I spotted three of them last night while I was waiting for the party to start. They look much less like food and much more like fish. Fish that aren't food, I mean.