A little fishy

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Our guppies had babies the other day. About thirty of them. I don't know how we'll be able to afford to send them all to college. Seriously, we've had a hard time keeping babies in our aquarium. It's not so much that they die off but that they disappear. It seems every batch of babies we get, we're lucky if even a few survive. We put a floating plant in, where they're supposed to like hiding, but it doesn't seem to make much difference.

We think the culprit is either the goldfish (he's big, but docile) or the algae eater, who's much more agressive. In fact, our goldfish actually started out with black scales, but he's gold now. And we watched the algae eater eat those black scales. He physically picked them off Oreo, who's more of just the cream filling now. So while Oreo has the larger mouth, and baby guppies would be but a snack, I seriously think it's the algae eater.

So now that we have babies again, my wife has asked that I transfer all of them (or as many as possible) to my tank until they're grown. Now, mind you, I have a desktop two gallon tank in my office. Not so bad for these babies for now, but things will not be good as they grow, so I have to look forward to getting them out of there as soon as they're big enough to fend for themselves.

Also, my wife's tank has a cory, and I have a cory I took from her tank. If babies start disappearing from my tank, I'll have a new suspect.

Updated 10/31/2007 at 8:27 PM: I have a new suspect. Of the twenty or so fry I put in my tank last night, only three remain, and those are the larger ones. Unless my one male adult guppy is feeding, too, it's all about the cory. Well, it is what it is, I guess. Now I don't have to worry about transferring them all back,