just keep swimming

in july of last year i got myself a work anniversary gift in the form a companion fish. i sit at the front desk at my job and since i’m separated from everyone else in the office, i can get lonely sometimes. after a lot of planning, i was able to ask my boss if i could get a fish, and to my surprise, he agreed.

we did a naming contest with my coworkers, and believe it or not, we went with the name swim shady. second place, and my personal favorite was offish (office and fish put together.) the more popular pun won out in the end, and so i lovingly refer to my little friend as swim.

in time, the algae grew a lot so i decided we needed a janitor to help me with upkeep, so we got a nitrite snail for swim to hang out with. at first swim was pretty skeptical, but now they get along great.

 

 

since this is an office with some 24 hour staff, we have lights on constantly. this proved to be a big problem because the algae began growing way faster than the snail could handle, so after some research, i found out that ghost shrimp are also great friends for bettas. so a few months ago i went and picked up a bunch to help the snail out. another name for them are glass shrimp, and they’re very hard to spot. but that made each day a bit of an adventure, trying to count each of them and make sure swim didn’t have a mini-feast.

yesterday i ended up adding another snail, this time a blue mystery snail, and some more ghost shrimp. three had mysteriously disappeared, and i’m suspecting that maybe swim had something to do with this, though i have no proof.

but then today i was very shocked to find a dead shrimp on my desk! i think he may have jumped out of the tank and fell to his death. i was pretty saddened by this, but in the end there wasn’t much i could do. such an odd thing to find this morning. it makes me wonder how many other shrimp may have died this way. maybe that explains the disappearances.

another issue i have is that swim has a bad habit of attacking the output filter for the water. i think he thinks it’s another fish in his tank. because of this, the current tends to sweep him away so his fins have become quite raggedy since then. does anyone know a good way to stop him from doing this? a lot of articles i read suggested that he’ll realize in time that it’s not a fish and stop attacking it, but after almost a year, he’s still doing it.

anyways, i added in the new friends yesterday, and so far things are okay. swim has been a little more riled up than usual, i think he’s just feeling territorial. he’ll get used to his new friends, soon, and i’ll enjoy taking lots of pictures.

do you have any fish?