Fish Tales

Well, yesterday we did it ... we drove for over an hour to deliver baby fancy guppies to a pet store in Winchester. I bagged up over TWENTY baby guppies in various stages of growth into two gallon-sized bags and we hit the road. Unfortunately, while I was bagging the guppies we had a crisis -

"Mommy you can't give away ALL the baby fish!! You CAN'T!! You have to leave some here!!" This was said in the midst of many tears and a red face.

*sigh* I couldn't catch ALL the babies so I told him that we still had some in the aquarium but that wasn't good enough. He insisted I put some back, so I stuck my hand in among the TAME baby fish and manually scooped one out and put it back. Then he declared it wasn't enough - I had to scoop ANOTHER one out of the bags and put it back as well. So instead of only having about four baby fish left in the aquarium, we wound up with about six. That was IN THE TANK. I changed the filter this morning and checked the filter housing and found at least EIGHT newly spawned LIVE fry in the filter. F*ck me! I couldn't stick the net into the housing because it's too big and I didn't want to put the water from the housing back into the aquarium with all the yuck as well (and I REALLY did not want to have over a dozen babies still in the aquarium) so I just went ahead and quickly and quietly poured them down the sink with the rest of the icky water before putting in a fresh filter bag and reassembling the filter. So I am a fish murderer. Just don't tell my son, please.

Luckily (heavy sarcasm there) we have four females and two males to make MORE FRY for the little guy. I do plan on letting a batch get large enough for me to "sex" them and keeping a male from one of these spawnings of my females and males - I want a nice pretty one from the mix of colors I have in the tank. I still really want a blue male, but that's not realistic since we're already almost at capacity for fishies in our aquarium. Also, every single freaking blue fancy guppy I've bought has DIED on me so I'm feeling like maybe I'm just not meant to have blue fancy guppies - at least not at this time.

But for the time being, we have a much less crowded aquarium. I know I have MORE fry on the way ... but we have a little bit of a breather before they arrive. The yellow female just spawned so she won't spawn again for a few months and I'm not sure when the greens will spawn next. At least I don't have to head to Winchester again for a bit. I'm also trying to expand my "net" and find other pet stores who are willing to accept baby fancy guppies so that I don't "flood" one store with fish.