Tanks a Lot

Yesterday, I got to slosh around in slime and muck. No, I didn’t go to a Trump rally. It was because one of our pond goldfish refused to be netted and removed from the pond for the season. I waded in and prevailed by securing both goldfish along with 5 freeloading frogs.

I am happy to have helped facilitate the transformation of the two fish (bought for 25 cents each as feeder fish) from food to friends to freedom. I released them in a local pond where they can overwinter safely. Meanwhile, the frogs, who just helped themselves to our pond this spring like they do every year, were delicious. Just kidding. I released the frogs, too … into my belly!

I wish. I released them into the same pond. Any frogs still remaining in our pond will have to work their magic where they freeze semi-solid over the winter and then thaw back to life in the spring. I hear that’s an actual thing they do.

I already miss the fish. They were personable and friendly in an obvious attempt to get me to feed them more. They got big and fat early in the summer eating tiny toad tadpoles in the pond that were the result of tawdry toad sex in the spring. Unfortunately, I don’t normally keep tiny toad tadpoles around, so when the tadpoles were gone, I fed the fish stale cereal which they grudgingly ate from my fingers at times. And before I had to partially drain the pond yesterday, it was a quiet, peaceful place for me to retire from the world when I needed it. Take a look and see if you agree …

There’s nothing much left in the pond to see … unless you look real close. My oldest daughter inspired me to set-up a small aquarium in my office as my offseason pond. She set up a 10 gallon tank in her school office and promptly killed 7 guppies, which is actually kind of hard to do. So, congrats on your achievement, Katie!

I started my tank with some pondwater, and OMG, there are some sights to see in that water. I’m hoping this is an aquatic worm and not a baby snake that will slither out of the tank, grow big, and kill me in my sleep some day.

That reminds me, Aquatic Worm is playing in concert this weekend in Chicago. Wouldn’t that be a great name for a band? Anyway, it’s still in the tank … I think.

I also noticed a couple of these lovelies in the tank.

I was thrilled to have these aquatic bugs in the tank, until I realized that most aquatic bugs like that are fly larvae. Back to the pond with them! It would break my heart to feed & nuture them in the tank only to have to swat them dead with a rolled up newspaper after they mature into gruesome flies of some sort divebombing us in the house.

And what is this monster? There was no filter going when I took this video. The water was perfectly still. This thing was moving on its own.

I hope that aberration of nature doesn’t grow. Those are or were all just ancillary inhabitants of my tank. The primary residents are some ghost shrimp, which are great if you like to watch transparent creatures that tend to sit very still in one place for long periods of time.

Cute? We’ll see how they do. So far, so good. And if I refrain from looking too closely at what else is living in the tank sitting just a couple feet from my office chair, I’m at peace and not at all terrorized.