dead things in damp places
So, I have a surprise day off work. And another surprise day off work. After taking an ugh day off work. Rent is due in two days. Money is a concern. I haven't been having much pharmaceutical luck lately, since apparently getting a mind doctor is prohibitively difficult on the aging military insurance I have that'll expire in a few months anyway. I'm wandering around the house in between fits of reading Shirley Jackson's short stories because my stomach is ill but I feel too restless to concentrate on reading for too long. I look in my fish tank, which is slowly becoming a wonderful world of blooming algae that I am, perhaps, more interested in than the fish.
There's a curled up silvery corpse on blue gravel. It's a long-finned blue danio that I had looked at last night and thought "she looks like her body's shriveling up". The cause of death could have been a few things - the fact that the tank never gets cleaned and the filter is never changed, water is replaced haphazardly, they only get fed every few days, and there's two aggressive orange serpae tetra who pick at the fins of any fish they can catch. Stress, bad food, dirty surroundings.
Removing the fish is difficult, because instead of moving the body towards the glass, I stupidly move it towards the large chunk of volcanic rock I overpaid for and she gets stuck under the thing. I don't want to touch the water, so I poke the rock out of the way and exhume the fish from its accidental grave. I flip her into the net and carrying her to the toilet, where she lands on some toilet paper left behind from when I blew my nose and she gets flushed.
I'm strangely upset that I had to dispose of the body. Annoyed, really. I would have preferred to have left the fish where it was and watched the decomposition process. I'm convinced that the larger aquarial community likes to make their tanks like modern houses, where there is absolutely no resemblence to an actual ecological system within it. To be fair, I don't think my tank's fragile little system could stand the added nitrogen as it is, but it would have been interesting.
There's a curled up silvery corpse on blue gravel. It's a long-finned blue danio that I had looked at last night and thought "she looks like her body's shriveling up". The cause of death could have been a few things - the fact that the tank never gets cleaned and the filter is never changed, water is replaced haphazardly, they only get fed every few days, and there's two aggressive orange serpae tetra who pick at the fins of any fish they can catch. Stress, bad food, dirty surroundings.
Removing the fish is difficult, because instead of moving the body towards the glass, I stupidly move it towards the large chunk of volcanic rock I overpaid for and she gets stuck under the thing. I don't want to touch the water, so I poke the rock out of the way and exhume the fish from its accidental grave. I flip her into the net and carrying her to the toilet, where she lands on some toilet paper left behind from when I blew my nose and she gets flushed.
I'm strangely upset that I had to dispose of the body. Annoyed, really. I would have preferred to have left the fish where it was and watched the decomposition process. I'm convinced that the larger aquarial community likes to make their tanks like modern houses, where there is absolutely no resemblence to an actual ecological system within it. To be fair, I don't think my tank's fragile little system could stand the added nitrogen as it is, but it would have been interesting.