It has been a little over 3 weeks since I set up my fish tank.
My original plan was to catch some local fishes from the stream behind my house to put in it but venturing into that stream has proved to be a little bit more daunting a task than I had thought. I used to play in this very same stream as a kid catching clawfish, frogs, crucian carps and surf fish... but over time, I have developed a phobia about frogs. Being surrounded by rice paddies, there are many frogs in this stream. As I walk on the bank to get to my uncle's vegetable garden, I hear all these froggies jump into the stream and it just gives me the creeps!
I know I was not always like this. I have a few pictures from my childhood in which the young me is holding a frog that I had caught smiling ear to ear.
What repels me the most is their legs. I just HATE those muscular legs. Come to think of it, I hate grasshoppers for that very reason.
I suspect my phobia stems from one incident from my junior high days. I was riding my bike home from my a Judo practice. It was dark and as I was riding through a narrow stretch of road in between two tall bushes, something significant in size hopped in front of my bike. Oh, the SOUND it made when I rode over it. I was too mortified to stop and see what I had done, and to what... but I knew what it was.
OK, while I am on this subject, I should come clean about this atrocious pastime we used to engage in when we were younger. We ( that's me and the kids from the neighborhood) would put a frog in a milk bottle and drop a lit fire cracker in it to watch it explode. Oh, we also inserted the fire cracker directly into the poor Kermit's rectum.
I am getting sick just writing about it. Anyway, I ended up going to a dealer in the next town over in Sano who specializes in tropical fishes. There were many good looking fishes with flashy colors there but I decided to go with a species called "Silvertip". It belongs to the Tetra family and found in the Amazon river. http://www.aqua-fish.net/show.php?h=silvertippedtetra
I have 27 of them and it is really nice to see them "schooling". Since they are from the Amazon River, I also have added some plants native to that river as well. So far, they seem very happy and the males are displaying very intense copper body color which is beautiful.
Since my tank is still new and not very well established, I have been trying to feed the fish lightly so the waste would not polute that water too much. For the last 3~4 days, though, I have been noticing something strange. The flake food that I am feeding comes in a small plastic container. The container is almost half empty!! It is just not possible from the way I have been feeding the fish. I suspected someone in my family has been secretly feeding them in spite of my specific instruction not to. Everyone denied it.
Fast forward to this morning. I was checking my mails in my office and realized that i had left my cell phone at home. So, I drive back home and open the front door which opens to the living room where the tank is. There she was, my mother, feeding the fish.
She claimed that she had never done that before and this was her first offence. She said that the fish had been looking hungry and she had felt sorry for them. I was so mad I called her a #&$%ing liar and stormed out of the house! ( No, I did not, really. I just asked her not to feed them anymore.)
If anyone, I thought it was my father but no... and I thought she was the smarter one of the two!
God, it is so nice to have fish in the house again!
My original plan was to catch some local fishes from the stream behind my house to put in it but venturing into that stream has proved to be a little bit more daunting a task than I had thought. I used to play in this very same stream as a kid catching clawfish, frogs, crucian carps and surf fish... but over time, I have developed a phobia about frogs. Being surrounded by rice paddies, there are many frogs in this stream. As I walk on the bank to get to my uncle's vegetable garden, I hear all these froggies jump into the stream and it just gives me the creeps!
I know I was not always like this. I have a few pictures from my childhood in which the young me is holding a frog that I had caught smiling ear to ear.
What repels me the most is their legs. I just HATE those muscular legs. Come to think of it, I hate grasshoppers for that very reason.
I suspect my phobia stems from one incident from my junior high days. I was riding my bike home from my a Judo practice. It was dark and as I was riding through a narrow stretch of road in between two tall bushes, something significant in size hopped in front of my bike. Oh, the SOUND it made when I rode over it. I was too mortified to stop and see what I had done, and to what... but I knew what it was.
OK, while I am on this subject, I should come clean about this atrocious pastime we used to engage in when we were younger. We ( that's me and the kids from the neighborhood) would put a frog in a milk bottle and drop a lit fire cracker in it to watch it explode. Oh, we also inserted the fire cracker directly into the poor Kermit's rectum.
I am getting sick just writing about it. Anyway, I ended up going to a dealer in the next town over in Sano who specializes in tropical fishes. There were many good looking fishes with flashy colors there but I decided to go with a species called "Silvertip". It belongs to the Tetra family and found in the Amazon river. http://www.aqua-fish.net/show.php?h=silvertippedtetra
I have 27 of them and it is really nice to see them "schooling". Since they are from the Amazon River, I also have added some plants native to that river as well. So far, they seem very happy and the males are displaying very intense copper body color which is beautiful.
Since my tank is still new and not very well established, I have been trying to feed the fish lightly so the waste would not polute that water too much. For the last 3~4 days, though, I have been noticing something strange. The flake food that I am feeding comes in a small plastic container. The container is almost half empty!! It is just not possible from the way I have been feeding the fish. I suspected someone in my family has been secretly feeding them in spite of my specific instruction not to. Everyone denied it.
Fast forward to this morning. I was checking my mails in my office and realized that i had left my cell phone at home. So, I drive back home and open the front door which opens to the living room where the tank is. There she was, my mother, feeding the fish.
She claimed that she had never done that before and this was her first offence. She said that the fish had been looking hungry and she had felt sorry for them. I was so mad I called her a #&$%ing liar and stormed out of the house! ( No, I did not, really. I just asked her not to feed them anymore.)
If anyone, I thought it was my father but no... and I thought she was the smarter one of the two!
God, it is so nice to have fish in the house again!
