I never planned to be an aquarist. I just fell in to it when Jen and Oscar spontaneously came home with a fishbowl one day, and things "grew" from there, but not at all as I expected they would. I think I have stuck with it because I like researching and learning and because I really like planning and creating community. It's been an exhausting year with a new job found and lost, a good blueberry harvest, building our house, and Jen taking over Wolfsong. Things are calmer now, but I'm still tired and each day I have time where I'm unsure of what I need to do next. So I watch the fish. I wonder if there is anything I can do to improve their lives, if we have room to take in any more.... I can spend a whole day exploring answers to these questions. I have two people in my life who I love dearly who are also aquarists. They were the ones who called me home. Because I loved them as little ones and knew if I wasn't here I would miss out on being with them as they grew into adults. A decade has past since I moved home and now they are on the cusp of middle school. The greatest gift of this hobby has been to share it with them. Hi Wylder and Silas. Oscar is gone at his poppas' house, so I've taken over complete care of his tanks for a few days. After our trip to World of Fish the other week, we moved our molly in to a fish bowl quarantine (at Wylder's suggestion) and she seems much happier there. I did so because our dwarf gourami was picking on her and she looked sick/stressed. Her eye maybe had some ich on it, but that has cleared up now. I'm worried that this tank is too small for her to be in for the long term, but I also really don't want to move her back to the large tank because the loach picks on the gourami and I think they*(see footnoot) would completely terrorize the molly. The fish bowl isn't heated, but is pressed up against the heated 10-gallon tank. I've been keeping track of the temp and it seems to stay around 69-73F, which so far seems okay for her. I did order a filter set-up for the fish bowl. Maybe a solution would be to find something that could hold more water, like a five gallon pickle jar, do they make such a thing? That's a lot of pickles. Of course the ideal solution (but not sure it's one I can afford right now) would be to buy a bigger tank to move loach into and get them some feisty friends that can stand up to their nips. Then move molly back in with gourami. Eventually she should grow bigger than gourami so maybe they'll get along better then. Loach seems to be doing okay. They ate up all the snails (I'm keeping a couple in the fishbowl with molly, so that they can continue to reproduce and provide food for loach, cause I think they need it in their diet). Loach likes to hang out in the shipwreck. I really think of it as their house now. At first we rarely saw them come out of the house, but lately they've been coming out more. They are fast and fun to watch. They nip at gourami some, but gourami is fast and will nip back, so I think he can hold his own. It reminds me of how we might not treat our siblings as good as we treat our friends, but we can still get along okay. Jen did notice yesterday that one of gourami's flowing tentacle things under his chin (what are they called? [Silas has informed me they are called "ventral fins"]) was much shorter than it used to be, which must have been the loach's doing. Gourami is still swimming around just fine though. I want to understand my loach and his behavior better. I really liked what this guy had to say about his loaches in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqfivHPXSZE. The comments below the video were interesting too and made me think of what Wylder said about his tropical tank--how the books say his fish shouldn't get along, but from his observations they do just fine. Are either of you interested in making videos like this one? I really liked being able to watch his fish as he talked about them and their behaviors. If I did have a 30-gallon tank, I would set it up like this: Sandy substrate. Move my pleco and loach over. Maybe get another loach, so mine doesn't get lonely. Maybe another skunk botia, or a zebra/candystripe loach. Get a school of barbs. I'm not sure if they all need to be the same species to school, or if you could get say 3 tiger barbs and 3 ruby barbs to make a school. (https://www.thesprucepets.com/barb-species-1380768) Maybe get a school of zebra danios. (https://www.thesprucepets.com/zebra-danio-1378473). If you got a(nother) 30-gallon tank, how would you set it up? I found a website that is even better than the app on my ipod for calculating your tanks capacity and compatibility: http://www.aqadvisor.com/ I tried it out on a possible set-up for Oscar's 10 gallon if I ever get a 30-gallon. I hope you are both having a good break. How are your rum-bottle shrimp doing, Wylder? Silas, do you have your new tank set up? Do you guys have any ideas on when we should get together again and what we should do? Love, Magdalen *a note on the gender of our fish: I'm pretty sure our molly is female (and refer to her as such) because she seemed to be pregnant when we got her and there were babies in the tank a few days later (maybe hers, maybe the platys, maybe both). I think our gourami is male because of what I have read about the difference in their coloring. I have no idea if our loach is male or female, so I've decided to use gender-neutral pronouns when referring to them. It's a little confusing because a lot of people only use they/them/their when they are referring to multiple people, but that is changing and use of a singular they is more and more common (and I believe socially just). That said, I wasn't raised to use a singular they, so if I'm typing or talking quickly, I may mess up and use 'he' instead of 'they' when referring to my loach, but I'm gonna try my best to use the singular they, because I want to be more practiced at it. Also, I could be wrong about molly and gourami-- baby-making and outward presentation don't necessarily indicate gender, but unfortunately I can't ask them what pronouns they prefer, so with the fish I just make my best guess. As far as people go though, one of our employees on the farm this summer told me, "It's never impolite to ask someone what pronouns they prefer" and I really appreciated the advice and pass it on to you two as well. I know you both as he, but if you ever prefer a different pronoun, I hope you will let me know. Here is a little more about the singular they: http://iheartsingularthey.com/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/the-new-they/568993/ And a story I really loved about someone who uses they/them pronouns and wants to have a baby: https://longestshortesttime.com/episode-170-becoming-a-single-dad-while-trans And for those of you who are still with me through all the fish details (I know, it's a lot)...
The (not so) brief story of how I got here: We started with a fish bowl and an Applefest goldfish. After a week he wasn't looking too good, so I did some research and decided we needed to get a 10 gallon tank. Who knew? Why is it even called a "goldfish bowl"? I also didn't know (yet) it would actually be healthy to move some of his dirty water and gravel along with him in to the new tank. Conveniently, the morning he died, we were already headed to Duluth on errands. We went to PetCo for a replacement, but the fish expert there told us a 10 gallon was still too small for a goldfish, so instead we bought a bushynose pleco, a molly, and a platy. As well as a heater, replacement filters, two plants, algae wafers, and tropical fish food. (The fish are cheap, but the stuff they need is not!) Things seemed good. A saw a teeny tiny little fish swimming around one day and learned that the molly and/or the platy probably came home pregnant, and that they would probably eat that teeny tiny fish the first chance they get. A week later, I saw little tiny snails on the glass and learned that snail eggs often come in on live plants. 'Seemed kind of cool at first, but then they multiplied and multiplied. So I started researching what I could get to eat them. Also the platy had died of ich (or really of living in an un-cycled tank, which I also had no idea about), so we had room to bring in something else. I tried a dwarf gourami because it was the only thing I could get in Ashland that might eat snails, but it wasn't doing the job, and the snails were getting out of control. On a previous trip to a pet store I had bought water test strips, so I could figure out when the tank had cycled and the test strip packaging recommended this aquarium app for help managing your tanks. Once I had it on my iPod, I thought it would be fun to get Silas and Wylder to put their aquarium info on there too, so I could keep track of what they have in their tanks in case I could learn from their experiences. That soon grew into an "aquarium club" and road trip to Duluth to get a skunk loach/botia, which Wylder has in his tank to manage the snail population and hasn't seen be too aggressive or lonely like online discussions say they can be. Now you are all caught up. If you have an aquarium or know someone who does, please let me know, because I think it would be fun a field trip for us to check out some other people's set ups.
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AuthorsMagdalen Dale and Kaite Sweval grew up a layer apart, overlapping and paralleling. Belonging to the shores of Lake Superior and yet not quite belonging. Laughing and dreaming on the bench outside the ferry booth as Mag passed the time and Kaite chose her time. Left to explore as soon as they could. And then as adults returned home, perhaps to their surprise. But glad to have each other... ‘cause we know there is strength in the differences between us and comfort where we overlap. Archives
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