fish update

While cleaning the tank & my little guy's bodies, I found a survivor: Horatio. My little eel that could, apparently. Thank whomever for evolution! He's got a partial lung, & I think that's what saved him from the fate of the others'. It seems that if he wanted to, Horatio could climb out of the tank & crawl around, provided he was kept moist. Anyway, the little fellow made it, & I cried so hard for both joy & sadness. He was one of the first fishies I came home w/ four years ago when I first moved into my downtown Olympia apartment. I had him & Kellen, a bala shark, from when they were one inch babies. They grew up together over these years & stretched all the way to one foot each.

This is a pic of them when they outgrew the 10 gallon, & I bought them the 55, so they'd have room to grow:



I think they were only a little over 3 inches at the time, but already they were swimming so fast!

Anyway, I got the tank all cleaned, the rocks bleached, the filters rinsed w/ vinegar to remove all the hard water stains. I dragged the tank out on the front lawn & hosed it all out. I wiped it down, hoisted it back on the stand & started filling it all over again. Horatio was kickin it in a bucket inside, waiting. I let the tank run for a day, put the bioenzymes in, water conditioner, stress coat, aquarium salt. To be honest, I rushed things getting him back in there. I know that when you set up a new tank, you're supposed to let it run for 2 weeks before adding fish, but I couldn't just let Horatio sit there for weeks alone in a dark laundry bucket. So we floated him & set him loose in the big tank when I got home from work. & he could tell that he was still all alone. He didn't even want to swim around. He just lay on the bottom, breathing through his gills & staring out the side of the tank.

I sat there for about a half an hour just watching him. I cried now & then, saying how sorry I was for what happened to his buddies, for Kellen. (Those two came home from the store together.) Then I pulled up some videos I took of the tank gang on my phone & held it up so Horatio could see. & then he swam closer. He watched his old friends & himself swimming around on the video. & I started to cry again.

So here's to all that were lost: Kellen, Cyrus, Puck, Huck, Maximus, & Boris. Goodbye again to all the others that have gone before. I still miss every single one of them: Vladimir; Patrick Swayze; Jasper; Jacques; Booker; Mellen; Shadaim (aka, Lt Dan); Fred, George & Ginny Weasley; Mr Anderson, Calvissimo, & Katsumoto. (I'm sorry that Horatio ate some of you.)