Here Fishy Fishy, Bye Fishy Fishy: Share Your Fish “Tails”
If there was a Social Services for Fish, we would be so busted.
I am sad to inform you that Tad, Rad and Cad met their demise, as well as those other unnamed fishes we managed to kill as well.
Total lifespan at the Johnson Slaughterhouse? A whopping 23 days. For the lucky ones.
For those just tuning in, my daughter Hadley received a fish tank for her 5th birthday from her Aunt Lisa. My husband Jamie and I had previously been resistant to acquiring a pet but thought fish ownership would be a no-brainer.
Turns out the Wizard of Oz’s scarecrow isn’t the only one without a brain.
We started with three fish and replaced them after each ceremonial burial around the toilet.
Tad met his demise in his Man Cave. Cad attempted the back-stroke and ended up staying there. A few others died when the filter broke. We flushed the last-standing fish down the toilet.
It was a mercy killing. He really had no other chance to survive.
We were not bad fish parents, really we weren’t. We fed them twice a day, cleaned the tank once a week and loved them the best we could. During our return trips to Pet Smart, we were interrogated each time. I get this. None of us want our lil’ fishes to end up in a watery grave. But sometimes they went a bit overboard such as when an employee would not sell us a goldfish because our 2-gallon tank “was too small for three fish.”
This, from the store that crams hundreds into one tank. Then again, I don’t ever see their fish floating belly-up.
Maybe theirs are just more proficient in the backstroke than ours.
What pet sob stories do you have? Have you been/are you currently a successful fish owner?
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LOL at this post. We can so relate. We have never kept a goldfish more than a month. Poor little things. Miraculously, our dog has been alive for 12 years. :-)
We’re quite shocked that the fishies we got from a school carnival (grrrrrr) have survived for about 3 months.
No end in sight.
I am the only one feeding and cleaning.
Grrrrrr.
Maybe there’s something to be said for toilets.
Kidding.
Lori,
I’ve seen your tank and I had fish-tank envy. So gloriously clean, such happy, thriving fish. You are an inspiration to us all.
We have two big tanks of fish (a 27 gal and a 50 gal), and we’ve had more fish die than you can shake a stick at. It comes with the territory. I will say this, though: bigger tanks are, perversely, easier to keep stable than smaller ones. The levels of ammonia (ideally, none), nitrite and nitrate in the tank are typically stabilized by a filter — but it takes a filter a while to get established with all the good bacteria that will eat up all the evil ammonia, etc, to keep your fish healthy. If you really want to set up a tank that will thrive, you need to “cycle” the filter. I recommend getting three or four danios or other extremely cheap and hearty fish for that purpose. Then, you let them live in the tank, and the filter run for several weeks before you add anything else. You change 20% of the water once a week, doing a good cleaning of the gravel each time, and in a month or so, you should have a filter well established. Then you add one or two fish at a time, and you monitor the ammonia levels in the tank every day or two to be sure they aren’t getting too high. You should expect a little spike, then a taper (if the spike gets too high, change some water). Basically, you are encouraging the growth of more filter bacteria to take care of the increase in ammonia (which is produced by fish waste) caused by more fish.
All that said, there are a few other things to know: the typical rule of thumb is one fish per gallon of water in a tank, although for very tiny fish, you can certainly push that rule. Goldfish are notoriously filthy fish, producing lots of poop. (Sorry, but it’s true.) If you want more fish to make your tank feel more cheerful, I would suggest going for tiny fish such as rasboras, danios, or cardinal tetras. These are all schooling fish, meaning you want at least three of any of them. In a two gallon, you could have two small schools — say 5 raspboras and 5 danios, and it would look very pretty.
BUT you can’t put ten fish into a two gallon tank from the get-go and expect living beauty. That will be far too much ammonia for the filter to handle up front. Start with just two or three, and add a few fish every other week to build your collection slowly. (These are all tropical fish, so you’ll need a small heater in your tank, as well as a filter; you didn’t need a heater for goldfish.)
Too lazy to look up the links for all the fish keeping books/websites I read at starting, but if you want more help, email me.
I will have to heavily disagree about the not having a brain part. You were SMART enough to stick with fish. I was not. Instead we have dogs, a cat and a gerbil. I wasn’t home when the gerbil got here, and that was not a coincidence. Enjoy your fish!
We’ve had fish for almost 2 years. Well, one of them is the same. It is the only one we have left. I asked if we could flush him the other night as we were checking on the kids before bed. I got reprimanded. I’m just sick of cleaning a 10 gal. fish tank by myself. I hate feeding the stupid thing, the food just plain stinks. Even when I’m not pregnant. But the kids do insist on walking past all the cool tanks of fish if they have them in whatever store we go to.
MommyTime: you are officially insane. :-) Wow, what great advice. I had no idea!
Gaining inspiration from the other comments. I am not alone!
We always had a fish tank growing up. When I was a toddler, one of our black mollys had babies. I notoriously picked them up out of the water, one-by-one, and squished them to death, not out of cruelty but out of curiosity. I was supposed to be napping with my mom, but she fell asleep, I didn’t and I became a fish murderer on her watch. Ha!
When I was in grade school, my neighborhood friends and I had a club called the Golden Girls, for which we had Goldie the Goldfish as a mascot (oh, how clever we were). Goldie went into said fish tank and commenced eating all the other fish except a single angel fish. Well, Goldie and the angel fish lived until I was in college. No lie. They both got huge as the only fish in a 20-gallon tank. My parents finally got sick of scraping algae for two fish, so they regifted–ahem, put them up for adoption. But when they were separated, they died. It was kind of sad. We thought they hated each other because they were always fighting. Turns out they were just another mismatched couple in love.
Don’t let the PetsMart fish police guilt you. Fish are hard to keep alive. Even my BFF, who has 3 fish tanks and nearly a PhD in keeping them, kills them off regularly.
When I was in grade school, we had a tank of guppies. They had babies of course. One of the babies was sucked into the filter and miraculously survived so we name it Survivor. Then the tank heater went on the fritz. Mmmm, boiled guppies. Survivor was smart though, he jumped out of the tank and we found him on the floor, still alive.
In junior high, I got two goldfish, Dumpling and Black-eye, to put in a fish bowl that wasn’t being put to good use. Dumpling died within the first month, Black-eye lived for about 3 years. I was a negligent goldfish owner and only cleaned the bowl every 4-6 months. One of our cats loved the fish bowl. She would drink the water, but she never once tried to eat the fish.
When we were pregnant with our oldest daughter, we tried to set up a fish tank to put in her room. That didn’t work out too well either. Every fish we got had leprosy, okay we were actually having major pH and ammonia problems, but they kept losing parts. Poor little guys.
We are now contemplating a bowl of goldfish, but I’m planning on ignoring the “fish” guys and doing it like I did in junior high. One fish, one bowl, one cleaning every 6 months. It’s not like fish ponds are immaculate and they survive just fine in those.
The pet stores pull the floaters out on a daily basis. You just have to get the right angle to see them.
Yowsas–some more great tips! “Mismatched couple in love.” HILARIOUS. :-)
We had our first AND ONLY goldfish experience last year when my hubby thought it was a brilliant idea to get the kids two each for their rooms. My son’s fish managed to survive for 4 days. My daughter’s? Erm … 28 hours.
All fish had the ceremonial burial of the garburator as those rock hard, yet floatable carcasses gave me the heebie geebies and I envisioned them coming back to bite my ass in revenge if I were to flush them down the porcelin watery grave.
And because the kids were so devastated at the loss of their new pets, I went out and got them beta fish (aka Siamese fighting fish). They are durable, resilient and pretty to look at. Just tonight we were commenting on how long these suckers have lived – almost 1 year!!!! And trust me when I say, I do not take great care of these things.
4 days? 28 hours? I feel much better. And it sounds like we need to graduate from goldfish in order to see any success!
PS. Love the goldfish revenge. :-)
I’m guilty of fishy murder. It was totally pre-meditated too. My kids got some extra fish from a fair we had at church. I thought they would last in the fish bowl a week or so, and most of them did. Except for one little bugger. He wouldn’t die! My girls are older and didn’t name them or really even care. The dog is so much more interesting. You can pet him and he’ll sleep by your feet.
I quit cleaning the bowl. It lived on. I quit feeding it. It still lived. I let the water evaporate until there was about an inch of blackened water in the bowl. The sucker would not die! One day I finally had enough and flushed him down the toilet. Alive. I can’t even say it was a mercy killing. He’s probably still alive swimming through the sewers.
We had Juicebox the goldfish, who lived at our house for a whopping 9 months. He was an amazing fish, who could do tricks and communicate. He rocked, and we all cried when he died. Really.
As a kid, though, my sister and I went through multiple fish. The most dramatic loss occurred when she put perfume in the bowl one day to freshen it up. Who knew fish don’t like L’Air du Temps?
Back at the turn of the century, I got one of those little cubes at a local store (Walgreens? Maybe?) that had two tiny little fish in it. I don’t even know if they sell them anymore. I had them at work with me, and they made my cube a happy place.
I named them Fred and Ginger, because they loved to dance. After a few months, Ginger wouldn’t dance…she’d just float at the top, so Fred had to continue on without her.
He lived a LONG time.
I eventually moved him home to our apartment where he spent the rest of his days on the counter overlooking the living room and kitchen.
He eventually moved on to bluer waters (so to speak), and we haven’t had a fish since.
I hate to say it but the employee was right, you can’t keep three goldfish in a two gallon tank. Goldfish get really big and they are very poopy and messy so they need cleaner water. You also do not need to feed them twice a day, just once will do. Tank cleaning should also be kept to a minimum as it can disturb the chemical balance of a properly established tank. All of these things I have learned the hard way at the expense of many a fish. We also have a cursed thank that for some reason we keep trying to put fish in and they invariably end up going belly up.
Oh and I killed a hamster. He would chew on the cage and it bugged the crap out of me so I would squirt him with water to get him to stop and I think that chilled him enough that he got a respiratory infection and died.
Before you bewail the limited life spans of fishy #1, #2, #3, etc., consider the following tale. My daughter got my son two red eared slider turtles in the summer of either 1998 or ’99. They were cute when they were the size of a silver dollar. Pounds of turtle food and a gazillion water filters later; not so cute! When we left town, the cat could be dumped at the vet, but not the shelled critters. I got to wondering just how long we were going to be blessed with tank cleanings and found that the beasties might be around for THIRTY FIVE YEARS! When we turned them loose in a friend’s pond, it was hard to discern who was happiest.