#exploding fish

Athy had been with my parents for a number of years before I came along and had established herself in my family as an enthusiastic member of the troop.  

(She hiked, she swam, and she followed my parents willingly....which is indicative of typical Family Brainwashing.)  

The cat we inherited from my maternal grandfather when he could no longer take care of it.  The cat was a big, black, grumpy-looking critter that came with the name "Kitty".  At a certain age, I decided that Kitty should be named "Huncamunca" after the silly mouse in Beatrix Potter's tales. 

(Obviously I shouldn't be in charge of naming anything either.)

Except I was pretty small then and neither my brother nor I could actually say "Huncamunca" with any great success.  So Kitty stayed Kitty.

Unfortunately, as is the way of beloved pets, Athy got a bit older, developed cancer, and we had to put her down.  I think it was rather devastating to my parents, but I was a bit young to understand.  

(I don't think I got that the dog was going away FOREVER.  After all, we had just purchased our first VCR and I had the VHS of "Beauty and the Beast".  Forget the dog, I was living on THE CUTTING EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY.  My parents may still quietly hold this against me.) 

Kitty, however, clung on with a particular tenaciousness that is typical of grumpy-looking black cats.  He was definitely not a lap cat or a cuddle cat for rambunctious children, so my brother and I lived with the cat, but we weren't close friends.  

But, back to the fish.  

At one point in early elementary school, I realized that all my friends had pets.  Awesome pets.  Pets that they could play with.  Mom, why can't we have pets too?!  MOM!  My mother, not terribly thrilled by the idea of ANOTHER NEEDY CREATURE to take care of (and my brother and I were plenty needy) was not on board.  

I promised to be responsible.  An upright, upstanding, pet-appropriate individual.  I would be the best pet owner ever.  My mother, of course, saw  right through that bullshit.  

Eventually, though, she caved.  I could get a pet.  And that pet would be a fish.  

VICTORY! I thought.  I will have a pet.  I will be like other children.  My fish and I will frolic together forever.  

Boy, was I wrong.  Fish don't frolic anywhere.  In fact, fish sort of swim around their tank and glub a bit.  And if you get three or four of the same type, you can't even tell them apart to name them.  Whatever.  I was a pet owner.

My mom equipped me with all the accoutrements of fish-ownership--we had the tank, the filter, the tank stand, the gravel, the obligatory castle for the fish I was going to get to hide in.  We even bought that silly vacuum thing you use to suck all the water out and put in clean water.  We set everything up and went to get some fish.

Secretly, I think, I was hoping for electric eels, sharks, anything that was basically badass.  Unfortunately, pet shops aren't so good for that sort of thing.  That's what the black market is for.  I bought a snail, an eel, and some tetras.

Let me tell you about tetras.  They are basically tanks of the fish world.  They just don't die.  Or at least mine didn't.  I have no idea why.  Everything else I bought was dead in a shockingly short time.  We had funerals for my eel and my snail.  My father was pleased, because, fish fertilizer!  Straight from the source!  

He didn't understand that those were my beloved pets.  That I had nurtured and loved and fed daily with stinky fish flakes and brine shrimp.

Brine shrimp, Dad.  I fed them with frozen brine shrimp.  I HATED frozen brine shrimp with all the passion of a thousand suns.  It came in a stinky frozen brick full of teeny dead shrimp.  There was nothing more horrifying for my tiny little brain.  

And yet the tetras survived.  (They were Black Tetras, Gymnocorymbus ternetzi, for the enthusiasts.)  The other survivor was our plecostomus.  The humble plecostomus, also known as the sucker fish, found in aquariums the world over cleaning the algae off of glass.  We bought it to keep the tank clean.  It did more than that.  

Now imagine being a little kid and having to say the word "plecostomus."  It ain't easy, and I wasn't the dumbest kid on the block.  (Okay, my brother and I were just about the only kids on the block, so it was a close thing.)  So eventually it got shortened to "Plecostomimi" and then, "Mimi." 

(Did you read the note above about how I shouldn't name things?  It still applies.)  

Anyway, I decided the the plecostomus was a girl and her name was Mimi.  End of story. 

Except my fish were mostly dead.  And that was upsetting.

My mom read somewhere or heard from the pet shop guy that the average plecostomus needs more food than just the algae in the tank, and someone mentioned zucchini as a food that they liked.  

HAH.  WRONG.  Mimi didn't just like zucchini.  SHE LOVED ZUCCHINI.  That fish could and would consume the slices of zucchini my mom slipped into the tank in a day.  For a creature with a sucker mouth, this is quite impressive.  We went through a lot of zucchini. 

We also bought more fish.  We bought some zebra danios (Danio rerio) and some rainbow sharks (Epalzeorhynchos frenatum). 

(I was deeply in love with zebras for most of my childhood.  And.  SHARKS.  Obviously.) 

From then on, my life as a responsible fish owner continued apace.  For some reason, these fish lived and even thrived, which is impressive because my mom definitely had to remind me to feed them everyday, fed Mimi her daily zucchini, and took care of the tank cleaning. 

Frankly, it is shocking that those fish lived as long as they did.  

Mimi grew to a tremendous size on her high calorie diet of zucchini, and, as we discovered as she grew bigger, brine shrimp.  That fish was not a vegetarian.  In fact, she proceeded to eat the zucchini, the algae, the fish flakes, the brine shrimp, and any babies that the others managed to produce.  

(And they did.  I have no idea how.  My youthful introduction to Fish Ownership did not come with a Fish Facts of Life Guide. )

The tetras continued to chug a long like the invincible little monsters they were.  The rainbow sharks, which are not actually sharks, produced some babies, which were promptly eaten by Mimi, but carried on regardless. 

Mimi was a sassy fish.

But it's the danios that I really want to talk to you about.

As you might be able to tell, I was not the most engaged fish owner.  Fish turned out not to be the dream pet that I wanted and still required care.  (Ugh!  Brine shrimp!) But I had them, and mostly, ignored them and fed them gratuitous amounts of fish food every day. 

That was until one day, when we noticed one of the danios getting fat.  One of the rainbow sharks had gotten fat and that had resulted in fishy babies that were brutally eaten by the only fish with a name and a personality.  So I was kind of excited about this--whether I was excited for babies! or the inevitable massacre that would follow, I really couldn't say. 

That fish got fatter and fatter and produced absolutely no babies.  However, it behaved exactly like all its brethren, so, we assumed, it wasn't sick, just really, really pregnant.  Really pregnant.  Or I was overfeeding them.  Which was entirely a possibility.  I really hated brine shrimp duty, but I made sure those fish ate.  

And then, one morning, I came down, resigned to sprinkling stinky fish flakes to my hard-won pets, only to discover that the Fat Danio had--for lack of a better term--exploded.  The fish had popped.  Whatever was wrong with it, and something clearly had been, because babies don't usually eat their way out of their parents (at least not outside the insect world), had finally strained the fish to the max.  

Mimi was definitely contemplating eating it. 

And that was how I blew up my fish, which, tragically, was the highlight of my experience with Fish Ownership.

(Postscript: Not long after the horrifying events described above, my family moved, and we were forced to give up our fish.  Mimi was taken back to the pet store with strict instructions to feed her daily zucchini and to find her a good home.  At the time, she was probably about 16" long, which is pretty big for a fish.  Let us all hope that she found another child to love her and another long-suffering mother to feed her endless zucchini.  I have no idea what happened to the sharks or the remaining danios.  I can only assume that the tetras are still alive and trucking along.  Somewhere. Those fuckers just didn't die.

Additionally, I actually did some research to bring you this story.  It turns out that I owned a bunch of fairly aggressive fish, so it's amazing that they didn't all kill each other.  Also, plecostomus (yes, that is the plural) are apparently omnivorous and have been known to enjoy shrimp, shrimp pellets, flake fish food, algae wafers, cucumber, lettuce, peas, and melon, and any semisoft fruit or vegetable.  Mimi could have eaten us out of house and home!  Plecos, as real people apparently call them, are quite popular in aquariums, native to Central and South America and have a fanclub in Singapore: Pleco Club.