A few weekends ago, she went to the University of Alabama for a tour & to spend some time acclimating herself to the area. She was gone two nights, so I went into her room to feed her fish and found this:
I texted her, "Why is your aquarium a black swamp?"
Her reply, "It's not so bad with the fish tank light on."
Ah yes, with the fish tank over head light on, it was more mucky green than gooey black. I could also faintly tell that there were some fish in there (look over to the right...you can see a guppy). At one time the decorations in the aquarium were replicas of SpongeBob, Squidward and Patrick's houses. Through the murky, gloomy water, I could tell that the houses had somehow been over turned.
One of the fish that Daughter had had in the aquarium was a Golden Algae-eater. She'd had him for years...he was about 1/2 inch long when she first got him. The last time I saw him (months ago) he was a good 4 inches long...sucker was HUGE. I had to wonder if he had gone on some type of rampage through the tank in protest of its filth, which would account for the toppled ornaments. I got a net out intending to stir around and try to find him. Flipping the lid back on top of the aquarium was a mistake. Imagine green swamp and river backwaters with hints of low tide.
Resolutely, I stirred around...I caught flashes of some other survivors...but not of the big boy. I don't know what happened to the big fish. Either he got disgusted with his environment, mutated, grew some legs and walked out of here without us noticing, or he starved to death and the remaining fish ate him.
I knew I wasn't gonna rest easy until I did something about this atrocity. For the next three hours I caught fish, drained the swamp and cleaned everything about the fish tank...got rid of the old rocks and put in new and refilled the tank:
There were a total of 6 surviving fish...none of them the big algae eater. Sadly, only one of the 6 lived past the shock and trauma of the journey out of the darkness. After two days...only an albino catfish remained...but he was a CLEAN albino catfish.
Of course, upon her return, I made lots of dire threats to Daughter of what horrific fates awaited her if she ever let the aquarium get like that again.
She's been very good about taking care of the tank in these last few weeks, so I'm hoping she's as contrite as she seems.
I'm still left with two nagging worries:
1. How is she EVER going to live peacefully in a dorm with 3 other girls?
2. Is there a mutated, air-lunged, legged (or winged!) algae eater lurking somewhere in my house...just waiting on his chance to exact revenge?
the last line of this post had me choking on my coffee. I, too, was guilty of this - only my pet of choice was a newt. I received similar threats from my mother and (luckily) the thing is still alive to this day. loved this post!
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