Posts Tagged ‘goldfish fry’

An Embarrassment of Fishes: Multiple Tank Syndrome

July 11, 2011

It's a fry feeding frenzy with ground fish food in a cheesecloth pouch.

Since the employees in the aquatic department at PetsMart have repeatedly demonstrated that they have only the most basic grasp of fish care, and there is a dearth of good aquarium specialty stores in Philadelphia, I have begun going out to a store called The Hidden Reef. It is nestled among one of several depressing Levittown strip malls. Its original location in Philadelphia burned down, just like the clubs I used to go to when I was in college.

Besides, The Hidden Reef, despite having a single location, has much cheaper prices than the PetsMart chain, and I can stock up on filter media, water conditioner, carbon and aquarium salt. I also thought they might have a lead as to what to do with all of my fish, when they grow up.

“Can I help you with anything?” an employee approached as my husband and I roamed the aisles, arms full of aquarium products.

“Well, my goldfish spawned,” I said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” He said. “How many do you have?”

“About fifty or so,” I replied. “Look, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with all of them. Do you have any leads on how to find people who want free goldfish? I guess this is the wrong question to ask a fish store.”

“No, yeah, goldfish, man,” he said. “They never stop. We got people coming in here all the time with goldfish. There’s always a manager on duty here, bring ‘em by, we’ll take ‘em for you.”

“And you guys can sell them?”

“Welllll. Yeah. Eventually.”

“But mine are mutt goldfish. They’re half fantail and half comet.”

“Ehh. Yeah. That’s fine. Just bring ‘em.”

“But I want them to go to good homes,” I said. “I don’t want to raise them for all these months and then have them die after two days in some goldfish bowl.”

“Welllll. Yeah.” He shrugged mournfully. “Honestly I can’t guarantee that. Out here in Levittown, you know, we’re not exactly talking about the best people to take care of fish.”

I was surprised that, as a specialty retail employee, he would so casually knock his core customer base. But I was also grateful to hear the truth about my goldfishes’ likely fate at The Hidden Reef.

“I’ve had my fish for years,” I said.  “The adults are in a forty gallon and the fry are in a two gallon. I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do when they get bigger. I guess I need another small tank. I don’t have room in my apartment for any more tanks.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “Let me tell you. I used to have a pair of rare-breed piranhas. I love piranhas. I had ‘em in eighty gallons. They kept spawning, and I could sell every baby piranha for fifty bucks after three or four months.”

“Ok, how many tanks?” I asked.

“Alright. One bedroom apartment, ok?” He said. “Twenty-eight tanks.”

He looked at us. “Ha, I love it. It’s like the tables are turned, because it was me making my girlfriend put up with all those fish tanks. But I guess women can do that too.”

I tried not to look at my husband. While he cares for the fishes’ welfare and feeds them diligently when I’m out of town on assignment, he has made his distaste clear for several aspects of the aquarium: the noise of the filters at night, the piles of fish products. There have been certain derogatory comments on the natural girth and greed of the fish. Then there’s the fact that I appropriated the turkey baster, formerly an invaluable tool for roasting moist poultry, as a cleaning tool for the fry tank.

“Multiple tank syndrome, it’s real,” said the employee. “There’s no antibiotic for that.”

I am currently at three tanks, but I’ve had a terrifying glimpse at what can happen to people like me.

Won’t you help?

For those who are truly devoted to the fry’s progress,  click on the picture below for a link to the world-premiere video of the feeding frenzy. 

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 4 Comments »

An Embarrassment of Fishes: The Thrill of Peas.

June 28, 2011

This post is one in an ongoing series about my goldfish fry, hatched in March/April 2011. 

Here I was, thinking that I’d better not go on boring everyone with tales of my fish. But my mother tells me that her co-workers are asking her how my fish are doing, for lack of news on the blog. And they’re not the only ones asking.

My mom’s a busy woman. So am I, for that matter. We could be discussing any career leads you might have for me, or where to go for lunch, instead of the fish.  So it’s time for an update.

The view from above.

Though the first hatchlings are nearing three months old, my mother met her “great-grand fish” for the first time yesterday. Living in a different state and working 70-hour weeks are no excuse for not visiting the fry.

After deep worries about a concerted die-off (combined with guilty relief that I would need  fewer adoptive parents), the casualties have dropped considerably. From tiny snips of thread  with eyes, the oldest fry have blossomed with fins, tails, gills, and just in the last week  or two,  scales with an iridescent glint. If I had to make a guess as to how many have survived, I’d put it around 50 (numbers were never my strong point, and they don’t exactly  line up to be counted). As tails come in, the babies’ mixed heritage is clear: some sport their  fathers’ fancy double fantail, and some have their comet goldfish mother’s long, sleek, single  tail.

2-month-old fantail on the left, three-month old comet on the right.

(Prospective owners: feel free to start thinking now about which variety you’d prefer. The fantail fathers have prettier coloring, but no-one beats the comet mother for sheer size, orangeness, appetite, grace, speed and splashes.)

The fry remain in the two-gallon kitchen tank, but at the current rate of growth, I’ll need a bigger one soon. Maybe even two. God knows where they will go.

Tragedy struck today when I did a partial water change in the small tank. After weeks of no filter-related casualties, six of the largest fry must have been sucked into the filter in the last day or two. When I opened the filter to clean it today, three of the victims were floating. The others were hastily released back into the general population, but I felt a crushing remorse that three fish had made it so far only to perish in the filter. One of them had an unusually shaped tail – over the last week or two I had been contemplating giving him a name – quite a step, for a girl with so many fish.

I fit cheesecloth over the filter intake tube and apologized profusely to the survivors.

In the large tank, things settled down a lot with the start of summer. Princess pined for several weeks behind the divider, hardly taking her eyes off the boys to eat. But a few weeks ago I risked a reunion. Nobody seemed to have the faintest memory of the activities that led to such a surfeit of fish.

The only real problem I’ve had recently with the big fish tank happened during one of this month’s partial water changes. I often put movies on while I clean the tank. While I loaded one into the DVD player, the siphon I use to clean the gravel flooded its bucket. Only after everything was under control did I notice that the DVD remote was in my hand, soaking wet.

The remote lost all function. Later, it was able to turn the DVD player on and off. Finally, as if it just needed time to recuperate, it returned to full working order (I kept hoping and checking, because I didn’t want to admit that I had ruined the DVD remote without really being sure of how I did it, other than it had something to do with the fish tank).

I think the fry have outgrown the First Bites fish food. Like their parents (and animals everywhere), they want to tear ravenously at something delicious.  Nibbling the algae on the plant at every moment they are not being fed doesn’t cut it. So I skinned a pea, squashed it slightly, and dropped it in. Mad with vegetable lust, the fry whipped their tiny bodies back and forth, dragging the pea across the floor of the tank with their mouths.

PEA!!!!

And so, every few days, I stand in my kitchen, exclaiming, one might think, to no-one: “Who wants some peas?!”

Two months ago.

Last month.

This month.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 3 Comments »

An Embarrassment of Fishes: Moving Day

May 26, 2011

“Be good,” I’ve begun saying as I leave the apartment. It seems like I’m talking to myself. But I’m saying it to the fish.

When I think about it, I’m not sure what would constitute good behavior on their part. For the adults, not making more fry while I’m gone? (After several days of the tank divider I took pity on them and they were reunited. I went to the basement to do the laundry and when I came back up they were spawning. I took no egg-saving measures and nobody hatched. Divider re-installed.) Good behavior on the part of the fry could be to not die of unknown causes before I get home.

Because part of me is sorry to report that numbers have thinned somewhat of late. I say part of me because my worries about fry demise are balanced by a selfish relief at having fewer fish to find homes for.

At about seven weeks old, the first batch of fry began to experience a few losses per day. The tiny transparent bodies came to rest on the bottom of the crib. I’ve been fretting about it in the theater, on the train, and in bed. Am I proving a derelict fish parent after all? My ignorance had allowed the hatching in the first place. Now was my lack of know-how proving fatal?

I decided it was time to step up my game.

Powdered foods are all right, the experts say. But nothing is better for the fry than freshly hatched brine shrimp. The problem is the freshly hatched part. After fruitless visits to PetSmart and Petco (where friendly employees’ knowledge, somehow, is always limited to what is printed on the back of the package I am considering), my husband and I took a thirty minute drive to a specialty aquarium store to spend $12.99 on a plastic Shrimpery.

  “San Francisco Bay Brand”, the box said. Gourmet seafood, but not for       us. Three plastic packets of Sally’s Hatch Mix were included.

Doubts were already filtering in on the ethics of nurturing infant shrimp  only to feed them to infant fish. As I stirred the eggs into the Shrimpery and put it in a warm place, I tried to see it as plugging in the crock pot.

It would be at least twenty-four hours before the shrimp emerged, and they weren’t the only things I needed to cultivate. An aquarium store employee had suggested that my fry could be suffering from the ammonia from the large tank, which is not dangerous to the adult fish at low levels, but can stunt the tiny ones. It was time for them to get their own place.

The two-gallon tank is seeing a lot of service this year. First it was the hospital, then the nunnery, and now it’s the dorm. But you can’t just pour fish into a fresh tank (take note, potential adoptive parents). Every thriving fish-tank has a helpful bacteria population which alleviates the toxic by-products of life in the tank. A new fish-tank must be colonized by these bacteria before the fish arrive. This is one reason many people think that goldfish have a lifespan of roughly two days, once purchased. Fortunately I had a head-start with the large tank, and I transferred a plastic plant, some gravel and a filter element to the small tank, and let the tank run for about 30 hours.

If you're the person who gave us this casserole dish as a wedding present, I hope you're not too miffed to see how I'm using it. No receptacle is safe anymore at our house.

Then the kids bade goodbye to the crib and moved into the dorm.  They explored their spacious new surroundings in a businesslike manner. My husband noticed his new surroundings as well, namely the fish-tank on the kitchen counter between the cooking utensils and the sugar jar, but gallantly kept his peace.

Meanwhile, the shrimp were hatching. They swam up into the Shrimpery’s plastic top, pulsing orange-brown specks surging toward the light. I consulted a website on brine shrimp raising, and learned that it was even more complicated than I thought, involving worries over relative water salinity and the apparently minute window for the shrimp’s optimum nutritional value to the fish.

Don't go into the light!

I poured the shrimp in with the fry and the feast commenced.

As I hung over the little tank past midnight, I fancied that I had as many worries as parents leaving their child to undergrad orientation. What if the babies got sucked into the filter? What if they were frightened in the relative ocean of two gallons, after the confines of the crib? What if they got hungry?

At least, I told myself, they had a ready snack. The plant has a healthy coating of algae, and, like a dining-hall salad bar, it’s no shrimp cocktail, but it can be grudgingly nibbled at odd hours.

The next day, the risk of the filter still nagged at me, and just to check, I momentarily removed the filter matrix. Four or five fry of various sizes immediately shot out of the filter spout like infants out of a water-slide. Oppressed by guilt, I fixed a cheese-cloth square over the intake pipe with a rubber band.

Then I fed them all their favorite lunch, wrapping a fragment of hard-boiled egg-yolk in another bit of cheesecloth. This becomes an underwater egg-bomb buffet. Through their transparent skins, the fry’s little stomachs began to bulge yellow.

Meanwhile, the adults are sulking too much about their ongoing separation to notice their empty nest. I leaned over the large tank this afternoon, to reaffix the world map that decorates the wall behind it. Suddenly a large splash drenched my face. Princess darted back to the bottom of the tank as I wiped my glasses. I swear she was waiting for my face to get close enough. Definitely not good behavior.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 3 Comments »

An Embarrassment of Fishes

May 9, 2011

The newest Mabaso fish: note well-grown month-old fry and tiny day-old fry, clinging to the sides.

This time around, at least, I have some experience.  As I eyed the latest round of goldfish eggs stuck to the crib holding their month-old (and two-week old) brethren, I weighed my choices. It was too late for preventive measures. I had to decide if I would leave this round to the mercy of their 7-inch parents in their 40-gallon world.

I got out the mixing bowl.

It was a tricky operation, but I dumped the existing fry into the bowl and removed their impending siblings from the outside to the inside of the crib using a baby-food spoon and a cheese knife. I scanned the rest of the tank, but could not see any more eggs. I replaced the crib and all its denizens.

I waited. In the meantime, I also worried about poor Princess, still knocking herself against the filter in vain.

It didn’t take more than another day. The new fry began to emerge. Every egg in the crib hatched. But to my deeper chagrin, dozens of fry had obviously escaped my earlier inspection. What could I do but go after them with the glass measuring cup that was dedicated to the fish tank years ago? (We have an identical measuring cup in the kitchen cupboard and my husband worries that one day, I’ll mix them up.)

By now, I am an expert at the Ambush and Scoop. With most fry clinging to the tank’s sides relatively close to the surface, one can quickly and gently plunge the cup into the water behind them, and the fry are sucked harmlessly in. Then I pour them into the crib. (Whether or not Serious Goldfish Breeders have ever employed this technique does not interest me.)

Instead of working on the essays I wanted to finish, doing the laundry, or watching my Netflix DVD, I spent hours scooping fry. Then I sighed in resignation, unplugged the power cord, and rescued all the babies that had been sucked into the filter.

Seeing that the population of the crib has almost doubled, the problem of Princess came into even sharper focus.  When the first batch was hatched I said I can’t handle this ever again, and now that I’m chasing the third, I’d like to say that I really can’t handle this ever again.  Princess hates the nunnery, but I’m certainly not risking a co-ed tank.

I went back to the pet store and bought some bits of mesh, plastic and wire that assemble into a “Tank Divider.” This costs $14.99. There are many fish you can buy for this price, but at this time it is necessary for me to spend fifteen dollars to NOT have any more fish.

I thought Princess would be happier if she had more space and was in her accustomed environment. But she is like those sad little lizards at PetSmart who try endlessly to climb the glass fronts of their terrariums. When she is not looking high and low for a weakness at the top, bottom or sides of the divider, she is resting with her lips to the fence.

Sometimes she noses the crib, but no-one in there gives her any comfort. Her erstwhile suitors sometimes visit her on their side of the wall as well as they can. Wherefore art thou egg bearers?

“She’s going to go Free Willy on that thing,” was my husband’s opinion on the Tank Divider. I am just irritated that now I am responsible for three separate food disbursements in a single tank.

Those who know me personally have begun saying “How are the fish?” instead of “How are you?” I tried to sell the world premiere baby photo at the top of this post to US Weekly or People for ten million dollars, but they didn’t want it. To the readers who are enjoying this saga: I will continue to write about my goldfish adventures on one condition. No more caviar jokes.

There's no such thing as the fun side when you can't hang out with the boys.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 4 Comments »

The Spawning of a New Era, Part II

May 5, 2011

Help me.

It’s been over a month since life changed forever in our apartment with the unheralded arrival of hundreds of fry. But my goldfish problem has only gotten worse.

I did a lot of research when the babies were first hatched. I bought new goldfish books, scoured goldfish blogs and pestered aquarium store staff. Basically what I have learned is that raising goldfish is a chancy business best undertaken only by the serious, adequately experienced fish-keeper. After I posted the first blog about the fry, a wistful fellow blogger commented that he’d been trying to get his fish to spawn for years, but had never managed it.

I envy him.

Frankly, I’m a bit embarrassed. Things are really out of control over here, and I don’t know who I can turn to.

Most instruction on goldfish breeding makes it sound pretty miraculous that any goldfish make it to adulthood at all. First there are the admonitions that aspiring goldfish breeders begin preparations months in advance, with special tanks, products, food and water temperature, as if they’re preparing for a risky military operation and not a bunch of eggs.

Once fish actually spawn, not all of the eggs will be fertilized, and there is also the goldfish tendency to eat all of the eggs they can find. The ones left are subject to a fungus that rapidly kills them. It takes a few days for the survivors to hatch, but once they do, they once again risk becoming dinner if they hatch within the parents’ tank. They are sensitive to temperature, pH and sudden changes in water quality. They need tiny, specialized food. There are no less than five different fish foods on the shelf with the photos of our parents (and one food in the freezer). One goldfish writer opined that most fry are apt to die off of starvation, regardless.

But nowhere is there any advice on how to stop goldfish from spawning.

This is my problem.

About two weeks after the hatching, I noticed the fish doing what in our apartment we now call “the crazy dance”. In fact, they were behaving exactly as they had before the spawning. I tried to ignore it for a few hours, thinking that if it’s so difficult to get fry, they couldn’t possibly be at it twice in the same month.

The sight of brand-new eggs in the tank cruelly ended my denial. I immediately removed Princess to a bucket, fed her, and left her there with a bubbler all night. Meanwhile, I cleaned the tank, removing the plastic plants to rinse them.

Three days later, the surviving new fry hatched. What could I do but scoop them into the playpen with their big brothers and sisters? Fortunately, probably due to my efforts, I could count only six of them.

I thought that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t. About a week later, the dance began again. This time, I could see most of the eggs stuck to the outside of the playpen, while a few, inexplicably, were actually inside it. The only explanation for this I can summon is that the parents, splashing like exuberant whales during their more spectacular leaps and knowing that they would be hungry later, had thrown some eggs into the crib for safekeeping.

It was a tricky operation, but I removed the crib from the tank and transferred the babies to a bowl I use for making muffins on less hectic days. Then I scrubbed the crib of all eggs. The Pope or the GOP probably wouldn’t approve, but I don’t see any of them  offering to raise several hundred fish in a one-bedroom apartment on a freelance writer’s pay.

I waited anxiously. No more fry appeared.

Not to say there weren’t problems in the meantime. Yes, a few of the fry have died off week to week of unknown causes, but let’s face it – it’s a loss we can afford. But Werner seemed to have sustained or exacerbated a wound on his tail in all the excitement, and I removed him to a small “hospital” tank for treatment. At the end of his treatment, he grew restless and miserable (I thought). He butted desperately against the glass and swished around and around. I returned him to his companions in the large tank. He settled almost immediately and all three of them looked ready to relax. I gave the fry their midnight snack and went to bed.

That was two nights ago. Yesterday morning, the dance was on again. Without wasting any time, I converted the hospital tank to a nunnery, and put Princess into it. Werner and Bling immediately went back to their regularly-scheduled napping and gravel-browsing.

Today, Princess is furious. She’s knocking against the filter, whirling and splashing. I know how she feels, because I’ve attended Christian boarding school. Romantic and sexual liberties certainly involved both the boys and the girls, but it was the female dormitory that was on veritable lockdown most hours of the day and night, RAs prowling the halls. Princess’s only crime was laying a few too many eggs, but I’d rather lock her up than double the underwater population.

When I came home from my morning meeting, I fed the babies lunch and did my usual check on the seaworthiness of the crib.

Oh no. Under the crisp brightness of the fluorescent tank light, I can see the next generation curled inside the tiny, transparent eggs.

“Just let them be fish,” my husband said several weeks ago, tired of my fry-related stress as I tried to halt the third spawning. It’s a dilemma.

All my life, I’ve felt a keen responsibility to my pets, from dogs to hermit crabs. I always believed that if you bring home an animal, you have made a commitment to care for it for the span of its life. But what if the animals you purchased begin to reproduce excessively?

What should I do? Keep Princess penned? Haul out the old ten-gallon tank from storage and find a place for it in the apartment? Or return her to her amorous companions and resign myself to weekly caviar-purges? The babies will need the ten-gallon in a few months, anyway (I already lie awake at night, wondering where it will go). I need a goldfish writer to stop telling me how challenging it is to hatch fry, and tell me how to stop the onslaught, because I don’t think I am up to maintaining the tank, the crib, AND the nunnery.

GET ME OUTTA HERE!

P.S. Do you want a goldfish?

Pick one.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 8 Comments »

The Spawning of a New Era

April 5, 2011

My friends’ kids make their online debut in an ultrasound at three or four months. Once the child is born, parents usually go on to be wholly replaced by their offspring, with a profile picture featuring the child and status updates entirely composed of their child’s absurd, cheeky statements.

I never understood it.

But then I woke up on Thursday morning and learned how radically everything can change.

I fed my goldfish breakfast. Fondly I watched their usual frenzy over the pellets. But then I noticed something strange against the glass. There was something else in the aquarium. About five millimeters long, they looked like miniscule eyeballs attached to a thread-thin spine.

I had to Google Image “newborn goldfish” before I believed it.

Pieces of the puzzle began to fit. If you look at the header of my blog, you’ll see how companionable my fish usually are. But a few days ago, Werner and Bling had chased Princess in and out of the large plant for hours.  I just thought it was just a little school bullying, but “courtship among goldfish often consists of the male shoving the female against plants while he shimmies from side to side,” says The Essential Goldfish.

Costing $0.13, Princess had joined the tank a few years ago, and preferred to hide inside the miniature Parthenon before rapidly becoming the biggest, fastest fish in the tank. “Goldfish do not form pair-bonds,” Goldfish: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual says. “They are promiscuous breeders. Any male will breed with any female.” Princess doesn’t need to know.

“Babe, look!” I said, pulling my husband to the fish tank.

“What?”

“You have to see what happened.”

“I have never seen anything like this,” he said. “Whoa.”

There is a peculiar, humbling wonder in going to bed with three fish and waking up with at least a hundred. It was no less than a true miracle. The world needed to know. I announced the births on Facebook and texted my mother.

Then my husband and I began to sense the challenges of parenting. The morning became fraught with anxiety. Thank God my meeting had already been canceled.

“We have to get them out of there,” my husband urged. “What are they going to eat? Are they starving in there?”

“Well I know the big fish will eat them if we don’t get them out. But how do we scoop them? Where do we put them? What do we feed them?”

I unplugged the filter and removed the three big fish to a bucket. Then I did what all new parents should probably do. I got on the phone for some help. Not that new parents call pet stores. But I’m sure the fundamental principles are the same.

At PetSmart, I had hoped to find someone who could relate to our excitement – and predicament.

“No, you’re the first customer I’ve ever seen who’s had goldfish hatch at home,” the woman said.

We purchased what we would need to ensure the babies’ survival over the next few days, including the apparent Gerber of the aquarium world, a tiny bag of food called “First Bites”.

At home, we opened the “net breeder” we had purchased and realized it was just the world’s smallest playpen – although, contrary to human playpens, this one would go underwater.

We took pictures of the new arrivals and posted them on Facebook. The fry don’t resemble their large, shiny, golden-white parents any more than first ultrasounds resemble a human, so I knew how interested everyone would be.

More alert fish owners – i.e., the ones trying for fry – make sure their fish hatch inside a special enclosure.  Clearly things had already gotten out of hand at our house, and now we had to round up the results. My early stints in babysitting taught me a little about the challenges of putting children into bed. My husband and I may have assembled a slightly smaller and cheaper crib than yours. But I beg you to imagine that your children measure less than a centimeter, are lightning fast and loose in 40 gallons of fishy water. Plus there are at least a hundred of them, and if you don’t catch them, they will be eaten alive.

“A large female can lay as many as 10,000 eggs,” A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual says.  Then the fish “greedily eat as many eggs as they can find.” Numerous as the fishies were, it seemed the population had been already been whittled down.

We got to work. While I had purchased a tiny fish net, my husband perfected a technique whereby he ambushed the fry with a glass measuring cup. By plunging it gently into the water, the fry were sucked into it and he sometimes nabbed as many as two or three at a time, while I was lucky to get one in the net.

The capturing went on sporadically throughout the weekend. In the meantime, I learned that unlike human parenting, bringing up goldfish in the recommended fashion may not be a pursuit the average person can handle properly. I will cope with the looming questions of who will adopt the babies and what one website calls the “challenge of feeding hundreds of fish” when I get there (one website urges feedings every four hours). But guidelines on healthy water conditions, safe filtration and frequent feeding of diverse, high-quality foods rapidly give way to more troubling instructions.

They’re not going to a fishbowl in the White House – surely somebody with a lopsided tail could live happily in a pond where no-one will be looking too closely? Apparently not. I am supposed to “cull” the fish over the next six months: as soon as I can tell which ones are the prettiest, I dispose of the rest (though no-one gives any advice as to how). One book says that only “one percent” of the babies should ultimately survive. In short, those who become successful goldfish breeders, unlike worthwhile human parents, must have a touch of the mass-murdering eugenicist. The irony of nurturing the fish for months with proper protein and pH only to massacre 99% of them seems lost on goldfish experts.

For now, the three big fish seem to have completely forgotten any role they may have played in the addition of the underwater crib. Perhaps they can see the fry in there. Perhaps the First Bites are filtering delectably out. Whatever the reason, the parents are intrigued by the crib in their tank. Or maybe they’re enjoying some shark cage fantasies.

The fry are nearing a week old and their progress, I’m sure you’ll agree, is nothing short of stunning. From clinging to the sides of the pen, they dart freely in search of food and sport mouths along with the tiny, transparent beginnings of fins and tails. So far they’re enjoying First Bites, brine shrimp, algae and crumbled hardboiled egg yolk.

Thursday: Day One. Mouthless babies cling to the side of the crib.

 

Monday. Swimming, chomping food, and beginning to harass each other.

As a parent, I’m contemplating my next move. Perhaps I could pitch a reality show – my brood puts the Duggars’ in the shade, or maybe America would like to vote on which fish survive. Perhaps I should launch a political platform on the value of ichthyological abstinence and the risks of underwater cohabitation. And I definitely need to befriend someone with a roomy goldfish pond. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to keep you updated – I bet you can’t bear to miss a moment of my baby fish.

 

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 8 Comments »

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