Our Family Is Growing!

Yes, Ron and I decided it was time - we needed to expand our little family. Thanks to my brother Michael, we now have a 65 gallon fish tank!

The living room floor has been braced for the additional weight, the tank has been filled and the first brave fish were purchased. We started with 10 little fishies, of which nine made it through the first night.

Day two of fish, day four of a full tank, we took our deceased family member and a small sample of our tank water back to the fish store. We found our water still had an ammonia spike, which our poor catfish could not take. So, we are down to nine little fishies.

We have four mollys, two black and two silver, and four red wag platys. To round off our first bunch, we have one algae eater, a plecostomus named Fred. Why Fred? Because Ron can say “Fred” a lot easier than he can say “plecostomus”! So, Fred it is.

I know, it's hard to tell, but in the picture above, aside from my reflection in the glass, what you're looking at is two of the red wag platys.

Here is one of the silver mollys and a red wag platy. Fred by the way, was too shy to come out for photographs. I'll have to get my people to make an appointment with his people and see if we can work out a photo session with him.

I can’t tell you how enjoyable our living room has become with our new addition. Oh heck, I would spend an hour in the morning, just staring at a tank full of water with no fish! Now that we have the fish in there, it’s unbelievable how entertaining this thing can be.

For now, we are sticking with our nine starter fish and see how we do. The tank needs to be up and running and get through its cycle before we go adding many more fish. Don’t expect us to get too extravagant! (Insert Michael here who thinks we need to put 100 fish in the tank! I don’t think so!!) But I do expect we will add at least a few more varieties of fish before we’re done.

And let me tell you, deciding on which fish to buy isn’t an easy task. There are so many varieties with so many different price ranges, which even staying on the cheap side there are too many to choose from. One fish store we went to even has the tanks marked as to which fish will work in a community tank, which is the kind of tank we are building. That sounded easy, as that should limit my choices, until you realize that there are still hundreds of tanks with just community fish in them! It’s unbelievable! There is just so much to know, so much to learn.

Ron and I are still fighting over feeding rights. I have a feeling we won’t be fighting so hard when it comes to the cleaning rights! But that’s ok. The cleaning will get done. As for the feeding, so we end up with fat, happy fish. Is that such a bad thing?