To make a long story short, our neighbor breeds fish and designs/builds fabulous ponds and aquarium habitats, among other things. We had an out of control tank over run by beard algae, so Andy decided to help us wrangle the mess. We re-thought our decision to place the tank near the window (what were we thinking!!) and moved it to a new corner of the living room. There it sat waiting for new critters. Because C really wanted to do a science fair project on live bearers thanks 4H, Andy set us up with some Endler's Livebearers plus a few ghost shrimp for good measure. These little guys are wonderful! They are too cute, and the males are really coloring up nicely. We have three females, two males, and several that aren't quite old enough to determine just yet, though we think there is at least one male in that group as well. We'll add a few pretty catfish after the tank is better established and the plants have grown a bit.
Fast forward to this weekend.
We had a big block party with our street. It was great! We had a blast. Only, in the middle of prepping for everything I notice that one of our three females won't come out of hiding and isn't eating. I was quite nervous, especially when Andy's response was that she was either getting ready to have babies, or that she was getting ready to die. Did I mention that I don't deal well with dead pets?? DH gets the phone call even when there are fish to scoop. Yes, I'm a wimp. :) We watched her this weekend and felt a little better when we saw her come out to eat once yesterday.
Imagine our great relief when we counted some extra little swimmers this morning! They are a lot bigger than I thought that they would be, so I had to count everyone to see if we had extras, and wouldn't you know it... we had 13 fish where there used to be 9! They are too cute with their big bellies. You have to look very closely to see them as they blend in quite well with the natural colored sand that we have on the bottom of the tank rather than gravel. C is having so much fun watching them! I'll put a call into Andy later today, and we might have to add a taller plastic plant in the back for them to hide in. Thankfully these guys don't eat their young since they are so large relatively speaking, so we should have success with these little guys. Unfortunately, I can't snap a picture of them since they are so small and so light in color.
But, here are a few sites with good pictures and info:
http://www.geocities.com/endlers_livebearer/pictures.html
http://www.aquariumhobbyist.com/endlerslivebearer/index.html
However... here are photos of our tank.
2 comments:
Congrats on the babies. haha!
Congrats! Gave me a start.
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