Sleeping with the fishes

After two wonderful days of life at the Heiss home, Fishy has gone to sleep with the fishes, and I think I may have been the one to do him in.

You see, like the crazy fish lady said, each fish has its own personality. Buh Buh's personality is rather dynamic--s/he eats, floats around, and puckers his/her lips. Fishy was much more relaxed--s/he did everything that Buh Buh did minus the eating.

Yep, Fishy never ate once. I've heard that can be dangerous for your health...

I overfed the two fish this afternoon while Nancy wasn't around. On the bottle of fish flakes it says to only feed the fish the amount they can eat in 2 minutes. Since it had been like 48 hours since Fishy had eaten anything, I figured it was time for more food (despite the fact that there were like 7 flakes of untouched food flakes floating at the bottom. Buh Buh only likes fresh food apparently), so I threw in 3 more flakes. Immediately Buh Buh surfaced and ate away--Fishy stared at me and puckered his/her lips. After a few hours, the water got toxic and Fishy succumbed.

This puts Buh Buh at risk, and I fully expect him/her to be dead in the morning. We've changed the water and cleaned the bowl, but the damage may have already been done.

There are other factors that led to this doom, however. Take their previous living conditions. Half the fish we saw at Petsmart were dead already--half of the individual Betta fish, lots of $.26 fish (Fishy and Buh buh's type), and probably 90% of the $.12 fish were all lying on the bottom of their tanks. Gross.

Let's take a look at their living conditions here at home. According to Petsmart and pretty much every web page about the care of goldfish say that they need 20+ gallons of water. We got a 1/2 gallon fishbowl. According to Wikipedia:

The popular image of a goldfish in a small fishbowl is an enduring one. Unfortunately, the risk of stunting, deoxygenation, ammonia/nitrite poisoning caused by such a small environment means that this is hardly a suitable home for any species of fish, and some countries have banned the sale of bowls of that type under animal rights legislation.

Looking at another section of Wikipedia, we can see that our fishbowl is actually illegal in Rome. Those crazy Italians...

So, apparently both Nancy and I can't keep anything (besides Rachel) alive for more than a week. Fishy only lasted two days!

Here's to the last hours of Buh Buh's life! We'll let you know once s/he's dead too.