Wednesday, August 22

R.I.P. George Bailey, Hello Skitty!

A while back, our betta fish George developed a case of dropsy. Basically, this means that his swim bladder was infected, and he couldn't swim straight. He started tipping over, and one afternoon, he actually swam directly into the filter! (WHACK! Faceplant!) Anyway, we tried to medicate him with a broad antibiotic, but the gal at PetSmart said that bettas don't recover well, if at all, from dropsy.

George was no exception. He seemed to be making a comeback when he suddenly just died. And immediately started to decompose. (Bettas are not very pretty when their fins dissintegrate. ick.)

After a while, we decided that we'd make another go of it. Maybe when Santa brought George Bailey to our house on the sleigh, George caught cold and wasn't very healthy to begin with. (We thought something was wrong when he refused to eat anything but bloodworm, despite the PetSmart people insisting that all bettas eat those flakes.)

We packed the girls into the car a couple weeks ago and headed to ... PetSmart! (How did you know?) And we let them pick out a new betta, as well as some playmates. (Hey, maybe George was also lonely.) The girls chose a beautiful deep-blue male betta and four Danios. The Danios are school fish, so they are really smart. No! I mean they are school fish, so they like to be in groups of three and four. So the girls chose two Zebra Danios and two Leopard Danios. (Can you guess what the difference might be?)



The betta has been christened Skitty because he seemed a bit skittish. (Yup, the girls' description of him.)

The Danios, on the other hand, were tough to name. As you can see by the VERY blurry pictures, they are very fast swimmers, and kind of hyperactive. I decided that since they are "Danny-O's," they must be Irish! So they became "The Irish Fish."



Welllll ... one of the Irish fish is a bit bigger than the rest, and he's a bit on the aggressive side. Like, he bit the fins of the other Danny-O's (I like spelling it that way better), so I put him in time out for a week. After he lived in yuckier water and could only watch the others play through the sides of the tank, I decided his penance was over and put him back in the other tank. I think he's behaving a bit better. But due to his bad temper and violent ways, I decided that he was probably not just any Irish fish: he is in the IRA!



So now the big fish's name is Ira. The others are just the "Irish Fish" or the Danny-O's. (O'Malley? O'Connor? Don't know. My Irish grandfather was a Haugh. No "O" there.)

And that's the story of our new fish.

Oh, and Skitty eats the flake food, just like the Irish Fish do. Which is nice, because freeze-dried bloodworms are a bit pricier!




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1 comment:

Barb Szyszkiewicz said...

You know, I really grossed out Big Brother (who is 15 and pretty hard to gross out) by reading out loud about how George decomposed....sorry, but that part was funny.
Enjoy the new fish!

Who are your heros?

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