I love animals. I have lots of pets. I have two cats, two dogs, and some fucking amazing fish.
You may recall that in my book Blood Ties Book One: The Turning, I used the goldfish’s infamous three second memory as a metaphor for… something. I don’t remember. That was like six years ago. I can’t even remember my husband’s birthday half the time. But the point is, goldfish actually have memories. Mine, for example, remember that my cousin D-Rock is bad news, because she reaches into their tank to terrify them. They are also loving and awesome.
I get more attached to fish than to probably any other animal. I always have. I have a long history of awesome fish, but these are my current awesome fish:
I like to think they are saying, “Jen’s back! And she has a camera!”
That picture gives you a sense of their awesome scale. That is a thirty gallon tank. They are enormous.
They have some stuff in their tank, which I change up every now and then so they don’t get bored. The pirate ship and the octopus are in there all the time, but the chicken is sometimes swapped out for a glow-in-the-dark zombie. I like to think I’m broadening their experience by including non-aquatic themed tank decorations.
The two fish on the bottom came from my great-grandmother’s house. She kept them in what I believe was a light fixture she mistook for a fish bowl. They were about half the size they are now, and great-grandma was afraid her cats would eat them, so she deviously promised them to my children when I was not around to stop that from going down. I was pretty mad, but in hindsight, it was one of the best things to happen to me, because they are awesome. The one on the top belonged to D-Rock’s niece, who gave me the fish when she left to live in Seattle. That fish was even smaller than the other two, due to bowl living. I was pretty convinced he’d be eaten by the other two, but thankfully that didn’t happen. Probably because I introduced the Plecostomus, the tank nemesis.
You can see the Plecostomus behind the pirate ship. He is also enormous. We got him at the same time as a little whip-tail, who didn’t survive the first week in the tank. No one ate him, I think it was overcrowding, though on paper the arrangement seemed like it should have worked.
You may have noticed that the goldfish have missing scales. This isn’t due to any kind of sickness. It’s from the nightly tank wars, in which the goldfish fuck with the Plecostomus until he attacks them in a rage. They will pick up rocks and swim over to where he’s hanging out and spit them at him, until he can’t take it anymore.
See that fish? That fish is a bully. But he’s so cute!
This is what the Plecostomus looks like in rage-quit mode. My kids call him Bowser (because they think the fish all have Mario names), but I’m the mom and I say that his name is “Cthulu’s Mom.”
Those are my fish. I videotaped the fish wars, so I expect I’ll be posting those to YouTube soon. You better believe I will provide a link.
Your fish are awesome!
A 30 gallon tank is way too small fir the number of fish that you have. First off you pleco should be kept in a task no smaller than a 55 gallon tank.secondly the bio load for such a fish is tremendous! I don’t know who has a bigger bio load, the pleco or gold fish who are famous for the amount of waste they produce. Also because of the amount of waste that goldfish make, for every goldfish you own you need to add gallons to your tank, for example, two goldfish is 20 gallons,3 goldfish is 30 gallons, so on and so forth. Of course you can help to cut back on the amount of waste in the tank by adding live plants which will use the waste as fertilizer but no-one the less for all the fish you have you really need a larger tank.