Les Poissons, Part V

If that title doesn’t make sense, don’t worry. It will. Or you can get clarification here.

We finally got the filter pumps for our fish tank and we also got a few rocks (pieces of coral, actually), so we decided to go back to Petco and get a few more fish. And by a few more, I mean, we more than doubled the number of fish in the tank. The problem with this, of course, is that they’re not all unique (well, obviously they actually are unique, but not in a way that is easy to see while they swim around in the big tank), so it’s a lot harder to tell if they’re all there. I suspect we may lose a few and not really know about it, just because there are now twenty of them and many are not easy to recognize.

I took a picture of them, but it’s pretty hard to identify them in the picture… although… that actually gives me a good idea. Well, not really a good idea, but a thought, at least. If I really wanted to figure out which fish were still there, a picture might not be a bad idea. That’s not really important, though. I can see fifteen of our twenty fish in this picture, though not all are easily identified.

The nine holdovers from the original fourteen are as follows:

• Cody, the Calico Goldfish
• Pablo, the Buenos Aires Tetra
• Mac, the Silver Molly (formerly known as Molly, until yesterday when the girl at Petco told us that his behavior indicated that he was most certainly a male)
• Midnight, the Black Molly that gave Mac’s behavior away
• Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the three Glofish (genetically engineered Zebra Danios)
• Manny and Moe, the two remaining Black Neon Tetras

Due to our recent purchase of eleven fish yesterday, we have renamed some of the fish. I already said that we changed Molly’s name to Mac (Alexa’s call) after finding out it was a male. The other new fish we got are these:

• D’Artagnan, a Blue Danio (so named because it’s supposed to be the 4th Musketeer, since apparently that blue Glofish doesn’t actually exist. It’s not really blue, anyway (more of a silver with a bluish tint to it), but it’s at least a cousin to the three fish that are named for the Musketeers, even if it’s not actually the same species
• Betty and Veronica, two more Mollies, but I’m not sure what they are beyond that. We told the girl at Petco that we had a Silver Molly and a Black Molly and that lately Mac (the Silver Molly) had been sort of harassing Midnight (and by “sort of harassing” I mean, pretty much following Midnight around 24/7 and nibbling at her fins). At the time we had no idea that Mac was a male or that Midnight was a female, but as I said earlier, she told us that their behavior indicated that Mac was male and Midnight female. She also told us that we should always keep at least a 2:1 (male:female) ratio of Mollies in the tank to keep the males from fighting over the females (if there were too many males) or just harassing the female mercilessly (if there was a 1:1), so she sold us two more Mollies (Betty & Veronica). She called them Speckled Mollies first, and the tag on their tank said they were Dalmatian Mollies, but I can’t find any evidence of any fish in the Molly family referred to as “Speckled” or “Dalmatian,” so I’m not really sure about them
• Snap, Crackle, and Pop (named by Alexa) are three of the regular Zebrafish (Zebra Danios), like the Glofish and the one that’s not really, but without colors. Well, they’re not without color, they’re just not brightly-colored like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (and to a lesser extent, D’Artagnan)
• Last, but certainly not least, we got five more Black Neon Tetras. Since we now have seven of them, we decided that the two remaining Pep Boys needed to change their names from Manny and Moe (because, really, what’s Manny & Moe without Jack? Not the Pep Boys, I’ll tell you that much) to join with their five siblings to be called the Seven Dwarfs (I’m not clear on how it became acceptable to call them “Dwarfs” when the plural of dwarf is dwarves, but I looked it up in the dictionary and apparently both are correct. I get that English has a bunch of exceptions for every rule, but I have to say that I really hate the fact that anything can become a correct way to say something in English if enough idiots say it wrong for long enough). Officially, they are called Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful, & Doc, but we have a hard enough time identifying seven fish that swim around constantly, let alone telling any of them apart

~ by jabeandkristin on 22 May 2008.