the fish swap (and aquarium creep)
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today I took our thirteen-year-old clown loach to the pet store in exchange for some smaller fish.
It was a painful thing to do. The fish was in great health, and at thirteen was a marvel for an aquarium inmate. Also, the fish was gifted to us along with the aquarium and its other inmates (now down to a Siamese algae eater and a rather pretty angle) by a friend, and I hated to have to find a new home for the thing.
But it had to go. The loach had hounded two smaller loaches to death by viciously chasing anything smaller away at feeding time. Also, it had taken to constantly harassing the other fish, and I mean constantly. I'd seen the thing use its greater bulk and speed to slam into other fish, and it had a worsening habit of nipping at other fish. I'd even spotted it locked in a strange mouth entanglement with the angle.
The result on the "community" in the tank was obvious. All of the (surviving) small fish cowered in the plants. The angle, unable to hide, had ratty fins that ultimately developed ich (which I now have to treat). The young loach, the only one of the three to survive the older loach's aggression, is now behaving with the same aggression.
After I took the big loach out of the aquarium on Tuesday, everything changed. The smaller fish came out of hiding and the angle's health began to improve. The overall tone of the aquarium is so different now, it's really amazing.
There's a pet store downtown called "Pet Menagerie" that I like. It's now the new home of the loach (which I'm sure will quickly sell).
In exchange, I picked up a zebra loach to keep company with the clown loach I've still got (they're of similar size and, allegedly, temperament) and half a dozen small rummy nose tetras. As I cycled home with this lot, it occurred to me to wonder if the latter were going to be a problem due to their small size. According to the friend who gave us the aquarium, the angle we've got grew up on a diet of live guppy puppies, so I feared that he might take the 1.2cm tetras for food.
Sure enough, from the moment that the bag full of tetras started floating in the tank, the angle started to try to strike.
So now I've got the tetras in a 10 liter bucket with a sponge filter, a small heater, and a reading lamp. And we're going to look at getting a small 10 gallon tank to house the little fish until they're large enough. I wonder if this isn't the beginning of a permanent arrangement. 10 gallon tanks are so dang hard to keep balanced, I wonder if it's even a good idea in of itself.