I just now bought a bunch of fish the easy way. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. It’s a lot less expensive besides avoiding a massive pain in the butt.
It already was a massive pain in the but and I hadn’t even set foot out of the apartment. I was still researching places to go. For more research. I wouldn’t be able to buy all the fish at once. No place would have them all. And the whole thing is rudimentary. Very rudimentary. The most rudimentary possible. The type fish that all beginner tanks have. The species that come and go in rotation frequently. They’re all beginning species. But try finding a lot of them all at once and few to none of the stores will have them. This will take multiple calls and multiple trips. And for some bizarre reason I don’t understand, all of the stores are at the far edges of town and in adjoining suburbs. Nothing is close.
They never were close.
Wherever I was the places most close were far. From the very beginning. Researching this caused me to open Google Earth to plot routes to remote outlets. And doing that caused me look how far I walked the very first time this happened. If I had Google Earth at the time then I probably wouldn’t have walked it. I don’t know. I was too young to drive and it wasn’t so easy convincing my mother to drive wherever I happened to desire to go any given day. I walked a LOT at age fourteen, the advantage was my parents couldn’t track my every movement.
I had one ten gallon tank following the latest move. Down from fourteen tanks that dominated my bedroom. Imagine walking into that room with all the appearance and odor and sound and lighting of an aquarium shop. It sounded like this.
Bubble bubble bubblebubblebubble blurp bubble bubble bubble blurp bubble bubble blurp bubble bubble.
All kinds of things were happening in each tank. Each one its own unique underwater scene. Sunken treasure, undersea divers, ancient cultures, Atlantis, Egypt, Greece, Japan, natural scenes, plastic plants, toys, bubblers, filters. electrical wires circling the whole room, tanks for breeding fish, tanks for fish that must be kept separated, tanks for fish that I caught. Then one major move and boom they’re all gone down to five. Then four more moves and I’m down to one.
I am fourteen and this habit of culling is firmly established. If an object is too much a pain in the butt to move and set up again, if you don’t use something in two years, then give it away no matter how much you loved it. The thing no longer belongs in your life. Objects are simply not that important. And clearing the way allows the space to be filled with something better. But that too is temporary.
I do want this tank. And I wanted fish in it right now! The last place I lived I was just getting to know the place and the people who bred these things. I visited their ponds. I saw their inside tanks, large concrete boxes set into the warehouse floor and filled with tens of thousands of tiny fish. I had hoped to see something similar here. But I never did. Only small stores. And not that many of them. And by the yellow pages, all fairly distant.
Incidentally, this is the last place I'd have an aquarium until age 38 when I finally have a place of my own. The next move with my parents to their final home, this ten gallon tank disappeared in the move. Most likely to their basement. I don't know what happened to it.
I waked some 23 long blocks following the railroad track from our temporary house to a tropical fish shop and that’s where I learned that Colorado railroad tracks are the driest, dustiest, most lifeless, desert-like, most depressing of all railroad tracks.
Cactus!
Real live cactus growing right in the track ballast. Can you even believe that? Cactus growing wild right here in the city! It's like a cowboy movie. The railroad rocks blending into the fine dry dusty dirt. Ordinary wild cactus, a scraggly unattractive and uninteresting dirty little pathetic ugly species struggling for its existence. I am walking from a tiny house on Inca street in Englewood to an aquarium shop on Santa Fe Drive near to Mississippi Ave in Denver and I’m seeing broken, torn, whipped cactus as I go. I examine them more closely and hurt myself by touching. I learn that it’s not the big stickers that get you, rather, the hair-like things thinner than needles that release and lodge inside your fingerprints that bring the real pain. DO NOT TOUCH these things. Just touching will get yourself hurt. A lesson that took several touchings to sink in. That rule is absolute. Simply. Do not ever touch them. Not ever.
A plant that cannot be touched. Fascinating.
Touch touch touch touch touch touch touch, with sticks, with tongs, with pliers, with leather gloves, with rags with oven mitts.
Their roots are sick. Long and stringy and sparse. These will be easy to transplant. You can see right off if you give these things decent sandy soil and fertilizer and lots of light then they will do much better than out here on the railroad tracks. I resolve to return with a box and tools and protection.
I didn’t buy any fish that day but I did see the place and returned later for purchases, and I went back to the railroad tracks that day and collected a few specimens of one particular species of cactus. The kind with prickly little Micky Mouse ears. I replanted them in the front next to the front door. They took hold and did well. They grew very quickly. But I realized I chose the space poorly. The sun rises then crosses the house and the cactus are in shade the rest of the day. So I dug them up again, hurt myself again, and replanted them all in the back where they get a lot more afternoon sun mid day to afternoon. And they went nuts back there. They doubled in number and size and they bloomed! Beautiful translucent deep yellow flowers all over each Micky Mouse ear. The blooms lasted for weeks then tuned into barrel shaped cactus protrusions or a new Micky Mouse ear. These cactus were fantastic hardly resembling their railroad versions at all. Just a little bit of attention of the teenager-negligent sort restores struggling cactus to their potential.
The most rewarding plant ever!
And you cannot even touch it.
I wouldn’t mind doing that agin.
Google Earth shows the railroad tracks developed much more than when I walked them. I’m not even sure that it's possible anymore. They might be fenced off to protect people from accidents. Now the light rail runs parallel. The whole stretch looks a lot different. I could park my truck near a more distant stretch farther outside the city and walk along the track scanning for the same cactus. What harm would there be in that?
The Google Earth search, the re-walking within Google Earth blended into the dream. Worn out, I fell asleep and awoke in the dream walking tracks in Google Earth. I know this is a dream and all that I see is not real. The houses to the right are not really there so they’re not to be taken seriously. The cactus I find are too splendid to be real, but I cut them off anyway. Their roots are too dense to be pulled out, the dirt too compacted so I imagine growing new roots from cactus portion. And I’m not interested in visiting the aquarium shop because its not there anymore. And besides, I wake up for real, I already ordered the fish and they’ll be here in one day.
One day!
I get ALL of the fish, 45 neon tetras, 25 harlequin rasboras, 2 baby angelfish and one female betta all at once, and brought directly to me, right to my front door, and no looking around, no traveling, no traffic, no parking, no discussing, no frustration, no second, third tries, no walking.
I’ll have to get my walk some other way. But not tropical fish. And not for cactus.
This is too many fish for a 55 gallon tank. You’re supposed to limit 1” of fish for each gallon. Something like that. But these fish will die before they reach the dimensions, and some might be put in another smaller tank in the second bathroom, the farthest room in the place. It depends on how they swim. If the number of fish is just right, and if they feel a bit insecure then they’ll stick together and school, shoal as they say, but if there are too many then they scramble all over the tank and are not nearly as lovely to watch. I like them to stick together. Both species do this, the tetras and rasboras.
The angelfish grow rapidly, they eat everything. They’re obnoxious food-hogs. Most adorable when small and most obnoxious when grown. They’re aggressive and mean to each other and if they are opposite sex and mate, then it’s all over for tank serenity. The whole tank becomes their breeding tank, one breeding session following the next before the previous young can defend themselves from being eaten by their parents. It’s fish-infanticide to completion, every last baby fish must be cleared for the new brood. An awful thing to experience. Once angelfish mate then they need their own tank with nothing else in it for they become singe minded robotic brooding machines. And you’ll need a safe tank for their offspring.
A female betta was the most interesting fish that I’ve ever owned. She had a thing for me. She watched me from inside her tank. Wherever I was in the apartment, she had a 3-sided viewing advantage, she’d be on the side closest to me to keep track of what I was doing. When I fed her she came swimming right up to me and she ate her precise portion of pellets. She lingered so long as I stood there. I could stick my hand in the tank and slip my hand underneath her and lift her out of the tank into the air near my face and she never struggled. She allowed the ride into the air. I’d place her back in the water and she didn’t swim off. She stayed right there unthreatened.
The angelfish give relief to the miniature scale. They do not bother with smaller species. While having them in the tank relaxes the smaller fish. They still school but not so nervously. In this sense they are acting as “dithering” fish for the tetras. This combination happened by chance based on my preferences and it worked the best of all combinations for me and my tank and its setup. That’s why it was so easy to make the selection, I’m merely replicating the best combination I’ve had with this tank.
Free shipping if your order is $100.00. That is a tremendous savings. Otherwise shipping is $30.00 and that fairly discourages small orders. While each fish is much less expensive than I would pay at any of the shops.
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