1st June 2008 to date
I'm going to put all the "fish stuff" in this one post regardless of timescale…
Oh dear. It appears I am turning into my Dad.
We now have THREE fish tanks. Two tropicals and the cold-water one.
Rhiannon's other spherical goldfish died, so one day I trekked with her to a very well hidden shop in Shinjuku and tried to persuade her to buy a relatively normal-looking one. She went for an ugly thing with a bulbous orange head. I think it is an Orange Oranda, but is paler than this photo. Fearing this weirdo would also be weak and die, I bought a Shubunkin too. It was the only one in a tank of many other, plain fish. As he grew, I noticed his face was pushed to one side, a bit like a Flounder. (These two fish have grown immensely and are still alive now in 2011, phew!)
It hasn't been plain sailing though. We bought a school of small white fish for the cold-water tank (no idea what they were, but possibly White Cloud Mountain Minnows). They didn't last long and got eaten…
Then we bought a couple of Weather Loaches (Dojo Loach - Misgurnus anguillicaudatus). Gorgeous creatures! We got a speckled brown one and a peachy orange one. Here's the drawback – we tend to buy these things without knowing their foibles. Turns out, Weather Loaches have a tendency to jump out of the tank… which is precisely what the brown one did on the first day home. Rather than explain loss yet again to Rhiannon, Tim shot off to the shop that same evening and replaced it while I reinforced the tank openings with tinfoil. They have both since died, sadly. One died in situ about a year ago, the other managed to knock the tinfoil off one night very recently (ie late 2010). We'd read that they can live for a long time out of water, so when Tim found it behind the sideboard it was still just about moving, so we popped it into water smartish… whereupon it died properly.
We've found a rather wonderful fish shop (called Pau Pau) over at Ginza where they have the most amazing selection of fish of all types. Unfortunately, Japan doesn't use Latin names for anything, just the Japanese kanji / katakana description which, of course, means nothing to us. Some things I recognise from my life with Dad though.
The first part of the shop is dedicated to plants, then there's a small section of cold water fish and the rest of the large ground floor is dedicated to tropical of all sorts. There's also a small reptile and amphibian centre where we spend happy times remembering Dad's substantial collection. On the second floor is an incredible array of colourful sea fish and a small café. On the stairs up is a huge tank containing two Moray Eels! The top floor has tanks stacked all over the place.
As I say, we don't really know what we are buying, so end up with unsuitable tank mates. My apologies to any aficionados out there that may read this, but I bought a couple of beautiful blue cichlids – which in retrospect was a Very Bad Idea as they were horribly aggressive.
This rather fabulous Plecostomas lasted only a year, but the albino still survives and thrives.
At some point I decided we needed to separate the male and female guppies, so we ended up with a colourful tank full of males and a dull tank full of females who continued to reproduce until all their saved eggs were used up.
I have a soft spot for the Corydoras species, but some are incredibly expensive.
All the Neon Tetras died, as they are wont to do.
And we have had various little schools of other small fish. Some are still alive, others deceased.I also adored this little fella above. I don't know what he is, but I called him Marcel.
Rhiannon owned a beautiful Betta – Siamese Fighting Fish for quite a while. The trend here is to keep them in cups. We put ours into a small tank and it took a while before its muscles were strong enough to swim around.
I have had to cull fish over the years. Why this job falls to me, I have no idea. So from peeling peas to keeping the damned things alive, I ended up euthanising some too.
Then came the memorable occasion when Tim insisted on buying what he thought was another Dojo Loach. But he wouldn't listen to me when I kept telling him it couldn't be as it was in the tropical section. The poor thing was put into the cold water tank. After a while it started looking very ill indeed.
I despatched Tim to our neighbour to ask them to decipher the receipt description while I caught the chilled fish and put it in the tropical tank. It perked up very quickly, thank goodness! The definition on the receipt was "Polyp", so I spent some time on Google and discovered we had bought a Polypterus. At this point it was quite small. But after the first night, the smaller fish in the tank were gone. It was hard to tell as there were quite a few in there at that point. After a few days we were down to a couple of terrified Corys and a couple of female guppies which I quickly relocated to the other tank! Good grief, this creature was voracious. And very prehistoric-looking. Dad would have loved it.
It now resides on lone splendour and occasionally dines on overstock from the breeding guppies, but mostly on dried shrimp. It's known as Monster and is a rather splendid 7" long and a little scary.
Raymi (the cat) views them as his own personal TV and spends ages watching them, and sometimes dapping the glass but goes no further.
I want to create a fully planted tank one day and am researching how to do this. Apparently you can buy liquid carbon dioxide so I set out on a mission to find some.
I fail.
Our current situation, at the time of writing this post, is one coldwater tank containing two large goldfish. When we move away, these are going to live with our lovely ex-neighbour and his wife.
We still have two tropical tanks; one contains The Monster and the other has a small, but ever expanding group of guppies, four Corys, some silver tetras and a couple of Rummy-nose tetras. We think these will be going to our new neighbour, but as yet we've not had confirmation...
