Fish City, also familiar to some as our living room, is now home to eighteen fish:
Impressively, all but one of those fish are incredibly hard to photograph. Shooting with a shutter speed of 1/100 and a painfully-noisy ISO speed of 1600 produced images that only somewhat resemble fish. Faster shutter speeds would require blinding the poor creatures with a flash. I can’t, however, think of many other ways to scare the shit out of them, so this is out of the question.
The guppies and plecostomus were added today. Brown algae has infested the tank and we were planning on adding an algae-eater eventually, so today was as good of a day as any to add one.
A tiny snail was spotted this morning as he crawled along the fake driftwood log. We imagine that he arrived with one of the advertised “snail-free” plants, and we’re hoping that he’s the only one in the tank. Snails have a reputation for offsetting their usefulness by reproducing uncontrollably, so he was removed politely and placed outside in the bushes.
I don’t think the 50-gallon tank is too packed, but I could be wrong. Everyone appears to be fairly relaxed. I’ve inspected every fish for any signs of stress or aggression—frayed fins, protruding scales, belly-upness—but everyone seems comfortable.
The cardinals have interesting sleeping positions. Each one seems to have found its own special napping area somewhere on the left side half of the tank. One floats diagonally in a small crevice in the driftwood, another sits right above the filter output hose. I wonder if there’s a company that makes tiny name tags that we could affix near their sleeping spots.
© Ian Langworth