journal features

a new start for a tiny pleco

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2012.09.08

After the great die-off in my larger aquarium last weekend, I'm going to take a month before buying any new fish.

But I wanted a new plecostomus for the ten gallon tank. It's a suckermouth catfish that I originally started keeping for the algae-eating duties it provides, but I've since come to enjoy their personality: they're fairly active fish with an armoured look and while typically gentle they brook no antagonism. Ten gallons really isn't a very large aquarium for such a fish (they can get up to about 12 centimeters in length, and the aquarium itself is only 50cm long) but I've got a nice little piece of driftwood for the thing to gnaw on and hide under, and if it grows too large I'll take it to a local pet store that takes donations of unwanted fish. And really, I think it'll be a while before it gets that big. It's only two centimeters long at the moment!

I tried a new technique for introducing the fish. Rather than simply upending the bag (in which the new fish was transported) into the aquarium, I chose to slowly add some water from the aquarium into the bag, and then after I'd been doing that (with the bag floating in the aquarium to keep the temperatures the same), I plucked the fish out with my smaller net, and let it loose in the tank with the gang of seven neons that patrol the place.

The new fish (named "Jammie" by Ken, and subsequently "Jammie Thomas" by me) has settled right in, and the neons seem happy and/or oblivious.

I've also added some small-size dark gravel to the medium-size light-toned gravel that's already there. With the driftwood and the neons looking bright the whole thing's coming together rather nicely, I think.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)