As I am want to do from time to time, I have recently latched onto another thing to geek out on. This time its fish.
When the bubble burst and onShoreD was forced to cut a bunch of jobs, one of the departing employees left a 20 gallon aquarium behind. After a while two of its remaining three denizens, a gourami and a leopard danio, slipped this mortal coil leaving a single 1 1/2 inch fish to roam the quiet corners of his massive estate alone. I had been considering purchasing a setup and the tanks current guardian had grown weary of his duty so I decided to take the thing home with me. I proceeded to add 11 more danios; zebra this time so that I could tell them apart from the now 5 year old "fishy" that had come home with me.
6 months or so have passed and I started thinking about making an attempt to raise a few danio from what I understood were the massive quantity of eggs that the average female lays at a time. I began reading several web sites related to raising danios and was putting together a list of the gear I was gonna need to capture eggs before the loving couple proceeded to consume them (danios are both monogamous and infanticidic cannibals) when I cam across a posting that implied that all you really had to do to get fries is to save the water when you vacuum the gravel. I did so, and what do you know.
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A rough count found 21 of the little fellers in the 2 gallons of water I pulled up through about 16 square inches of the gravel bottom. I think of all the times I've sucked all the gunk up off the bottom of the tank and poured the result down the sink and I have to remind myself that they are not my babies, and at least I don't eat them. I like to imagine a growing colony of the little guys in the sewers under Logan Square. It gets me through the day.
