He Didn’t Get Away

Ron and I have put a lot of fish into our fish tank. Unfortunately, not all have survived. For example, we have purchased a total of 10 angel fish. Right now, one remains in the tank. When I hand feed the fish, I make sure the angel gets his fill.

I don’t know what we’re doing wrong, but we can’t seem to keep some of our fish alive. The angels were one type, and out of 18 tetras that we bought, none survived more than a couple of weeks! This is truly disheartening.

I’ve finally thrown up the white flag. I give up! I refuse to buy more fish, just to end up flushing them down the toilet and feeling like a failure. When they all end up flushed, Mike’s getting the tank back. (Although, the one bright spot has been our plecostomus, Fred. He is almost to the point of being bigger than a turd, hence too big to flush!)

Most of our fish are live bearers, meaning they don’t lay eggs but instead give birth to live fish (called fry). The live bearers could have babies every couple of weeks. That’s a lot of breeding especially since in the five months or so that we’ve had them we haven’t seen hide nor hair of any babies. So, we’ve decided to try to help things along in order to help keep our tank populated. We bought a breeder tank. This is just a little tank that hangs inside the main tank. When you see a mom fish ready to burst (and that’s absolutely what she looks like before she has the babies!) you take her out of the tank, put her in a smaller tank and let her have her babies. Once the babies are born, you take mom out and put her back in the main tank and then the babies are separated so that they don’t become breakfast for the rest of the tank.

In a perfect world, the fry would stay in the breeder tank for a few months until they were bigger and had a better chance of surviving in the main tank. Keep in mind that we’re new at this and this is definitely not a perfect world. I know this is hard to believe, but a fish that is less than two inches long is extremely hard to catch in a 65 gallon tank! She will run and hide and zig and zag and it’s almost impossible to snag her without giving her or me a heart attack. Our first attempt was aborted short of ripping up all the plants in the tank and taking them out as well as any shale or driftwood. Ron tried again when I was out of his hair and on the road. He was much more successful. He was able to get mom into the breeder tank the night she had her babies. In the morning, in an attempt to get mom out of the little tank and back into the main tank, stuff happened. The darn breeder tanks are really cheap pieces of plastic and well, it sort of fell apart. But, before it did, Ron was able to see a bunch of babies heading towards the rocks in the bottom, so we were hopeful that at least some survived.

I feed the fish in the morning when I first go downstairs. I turn the light on to wake them up and also so that I can watch them for awhile. This morning, I was a little worried about my lonely angel fish. He was at the bottom, with barely one fin fluttering. Was he too tired to get up so early? Or was something wrong? Oh man, I was worried this morning. I don’t want to lose another fish, especially one that has more than doubled in size since we got him and so far seems healthy and thriving.

I just put some fish flakes in, and watched all but the angel come to the feeding zone and chow down.

I stood back and just watched the tank. Mike was nice enough to cut a mirror for us and it is now on the back of the tank. First, that makes our 65 gallon tank look like 130 gallons! Secondly, I can look in the mirror and get a better look at all the fish, since the mirror takes away some hiding spots behind plants and things.

I was looking at the angel fish in the back of the tank when I saw movement in the mirror. The movement was closer to the front of the tank, behind a plant. Guess what? It was a FRY!!! One lonely little teeny tiny fish! This little thing was barely ½ inch long. He was mostly transparent but did have a bit of an orange glow to him. That means that he is either a red wag or a yellow wag platy! WOW! I ran upstairs and woke poor Ron up at 6:30 this morning to tell him that we really do have a baby! A live baby! I saw it with my own eyes! I watched him swim for awhile and then as I came in closer to the side of the tank to get a better look at him, he went down into the gravel at the bottom and looked to be playing dead. No matter! I saw him!

I finished getting dressed, while telling Ron all about the new baby, then went downstairs to leave. As I was walking up to the tank, I saw it. My precious angel fish was CHASING something really small! And, um…well, let’s just say I can’t see the little fry any more. AARGH. I was so disappointed I wanted to yank that angel right out of the tank and go down his throat after my little baby fry!

Talk about the highs and lows all in one morning. I think the angel fish fell off of my favorite fish list and now is in the dog house so to speak. Hopefully there are more fry in the tank, other than the one that didn’t get away.