Below is Gypsy Moth. The third member of our little family. This is as far as I’m willing to go for the moment with Fella’s increasingly strident attempts to have kids. Originally meant to be my birthday present she is in fact the surviving member of the fourth pair we bought. On each occasion waking up to their prone corpses floating in the water caused Fella much distress so, Gentle Reade, we’ve decided to stick with just this one for the time being.
I will admit she’s quite the trouper. We’ve had her a few weeks now and she’s tolerated the condition we put her in well. Not that we’ve stinted. Special gravel; plants and a lovely amphora to swim about. Special chemicals to treat the special water to be pumped through the special filter and be aerated by a noisy box on the sideboard. We’ve gone through the nitrate cycle, the ammonia cycle, and the Cloudy Water of Fish Death. Then there’s the special food... yes, this is one pampered poisson.
How do we know she is a she? We looked it up, among the frantic Google searches about fin-rot and why the hell-crap-damn my fish keep dying.
Still, she has some personality. Before Baron von Richthofen Fish passed on (I’m sure he just did it out of spite) she delighted in swimming underneath him then rising up swiftly, essentially flipping him out of the water. Now, when she sees me, she comes right up to the glass before swimming rapidly from side to side, all the while facing me, almost like she's dancing. She clearly associates me with (special) food... It pleases Fella and I to see her swimming around her tank exploring whether gravel has magically become edible overnight.
Now that we’ve managed to slaughter half the Piscean inmates of ‘Pets at Home’ I think we’re settled. This one, the eighth one, is a keeper. We like her well.
JINX!
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