A Fish Story?
Once upon a time, I lived alone with no pets or other dependents. My best friend was worried. “It’s no good to spend so much time alone. You should get a pet!”
I was at a point where I wasn’t home enough to get a dog, and I wasn’t yet sold on cats, so I was eventually convinced to buy a fish. Now, I’ve never had fish. I don’t particularly likefish. My brother once asked for fish for Christmas, received them, and I predicted they’d be dead in three weeks. 20 days later, the last of them went belly up. But my friend convinced me that if I got more interesting fish that I could watch them interact.
So I decided I would get some Cichlids, which are somewhat larger, semi-aggressive fish. I was advised that if I put about 5 in the tank that they wouldn’t fight over territory. So I bought a male and a female borleyi cichlid, a fire-mouth cichlid, a red-finned cichlid, and a kribensis cichlid. This last one was by far the smallest, so I was a little worried, but I figured everything would be fine,
After 1 day in the tank the kribensis had begun ramming into the other fish and generally causing a ruckus. There’s no room for assholes in my apartment, fish or otherwise, so I promptly returned him to the fish store. Well, I thought, now we’ll have a nice little tank.
The next morning I came out to find the female borleyi (who was a very pretty blue color) expired on the bottom of the tank - apparently all of the stress had been too much. So now we were down to three, a fire-mouth, which was pretty small, a red-finned, which was docile and pretty, and the male borleyi, which was an asshole. Apparently the person who told me that if there were a small enough number of fish they would establish territories and fight was correct, because the borleyi chased the other two around the tank almost constantly.
About six months later there was a bout of ich, a fish parasite. The fire-mouth and the red-finned both succumbed, leaving only the borleyi. Of course the one I liked least would be left, right?
Well, this fish thrived. I once went on vacation for 2 weeks and forgot to put the long term feeder in the tank. I remembered this towards the end of the trip and came back expecting to find an expired fish. I’d been told by my friend that it could only probably survive three or four days without food. This was not true, it was as happy as ever when I got home.
This was three years ago, and since then I’ve had this unwilling roommate. It’s only redeeming quality was the fact that the cat’s would forget about the fish and then suddenly see it again, keeping them otherwise occupied and out of trouble occasionally. Well, today the fishy went the great aquarium in the sky. I can’t say that I’ll miss him, but I do think that my cats do.
