One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish

So I keep tropical fish, and it's not something I write about that often because really, how much is there to say? They swim around, sometimes Pip makes a grab for sushi, whatever. Also I am not very good at taking care of them - I'm kind of slack about water changes and definitely not good about changing the carbon filter regularly and the tank gets a lot of sunlight from our windows where it's situated so usually the water is a little cloudy and maybe a little greenish. Just like tornado weather!

And also I do dumb shit like putting fish together which then eat each other. I've got some serpae tetras and they eat the fins of the little neons that are also in there. Every time I tell someone who knows about fish what's going on, they say, "serpaes aren't supposed to nip neons!" No shit, that's why I thought it would be okay to put the two together, but apparently not. The neons are practically finless by this point. Poor guys just roll all over the tank without their stabilizing fins. I should really flush them and but them out of their misery, but I'm not even a good enough fish owner to do that.

And I realize the above makes me sound like a pretty bad pet owner, but I have actually improved. When I first got the fishtank, I was obsessed with the water and everything being sparkling clean, so I would do 100% water changes regularly and would boil the rocks to get the algae and germs off of them. Mysteriously, the fish kept dying, no matter how clean I kept the tank. then I realized that part of the problem was that I was uncontrolled when I added water back to the tank - I used to just dump a bucket's worth in and it would create a little tsunami in the tank and the fish would be dashed against the glass sides of the tank and die of their injuries. Doh. Also a fish-keeping friend came over and was like, whooooaaaa, you have the cleanest tank I've ever seen, I don't think it's healthy for the fish, I think they need more algae and stuff to be able to maintain bacterial life which will in turn keep the pH balance in check.

So now the tank is kind of dirty and I clean it less often. It's grosser to look at but the fish do seem to be lasting longer.

Which brings me to my current topic. If you weren't already disgusted by my tales from the piscine crypt, here comes some more. In order to combat the algae problem, I bought some little algae eaters. I know I brought three of them home but a couple of weeks ago I looked and looked and could only find two. They hide so I kept looking over the next couple of days but could only ever find two. So today I changed the water and even changed the carbon filter, expecting to find a fish skeleton somewhere, but no. I don't know where the hell that third guy went. I guess the tank ate him. Maybe he's under the gravel somewhere and of his bones are coral made. Who the hell knows?

And now that I have metaphorically aired my dirty laundry, it's time to get the clean load out of the dryer and get on with the next load.