Thursday, October 16, 2008

Aquarium Casualties : Tetra Treats & Swordtails

Our aquarium has experienced its first casualties. On Wednesday morning, my son noticed one of our goldfish with a small red tail sticking out of its mouth. He counted the neon tetras, and found only 3 of the 5. Then he spotted another one floating on the surface, with its head bitten off. In an interesting reversal of fortune, one of our goldfish, which was being sold as a "feeder" fish, found himself on the top rather than bottom of the foodchain.

The previous night, my husband had asked if I was feeding the fish enough, as he didn't think I was giving them enough flakes. I replied that I'd heard that one could never really underfeed fish, but can overfeed them. But maybe I had been keeping them too hungry. Just in case, I've increased the number (now 2 or 3 per day) and sizes of the feedings.

By Wednesday night, I found myself in a pet store looking at the platy's. They didn't have the coral ones (bright red with black tails), and the red ones and white ones they had were not particularly interesting looking. But then I noticed the swordtails, which are also live-bearers, were on sale 3 for $8. So we bought a male and two females. Here is the male, he's a pretty attractive fellow. My son has claimed him as one of his fish:
Male swordtail - orange with black tail
My daughter claimed the all-orange female as her own:
Orange female swordtail
I claimed this orange female with black tail, since she matches the colours of the male, and I like the dark spot (almost looks like a moustache) on her snout:
Female swordtail - orange with black tail
The plecostomus, who usually spends most of his time hanging onto the bottom of the filter, finally came down this evening (for a brief moment, then returned to the filter), but I managed a photo of him. This is a pretty cool-looking fish, wouldn't you agree?:

Hopefully with the increased feedings, the goldfish will not take interest in the other 3 neon tetras. And the swordtails are large enough to not be considered a snack. In fact, I already noticed the male taking a few nips at one of the goldfish, so I'll need to watch out if that continues.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I think neon tetras have the worst of the lot. I had the same problem.
http://www.afishytale.com/aquarium/the-case-of-the-missing-tetras/

Blog Widget by LinkWithin