Changed the water in the jar

I try to change the water in the tank every two weeks or so. Today was the day, so I also changed the water in the baby fish "tank".

The tank really is just a clear 2 liter Tupperware jar. You can see all those little fishies swimming around in there. They are still less than a centimeter in length.

Scooping the fish out carefully with a little cup, I found that roughly half of them were dead. Was it the cold? Was it the water quality? Was it sickness? Or was it just the way Nature works?

Anyway, the water is clean again and the healthy fish are swimming all around and an occasional dead one floats along the bottom of the jar. There must be 20-30 healthy ones now. That's a cut of around 70% from the first time I culled the fries.

Whooping cough in Japan?

About 15 years ago when I lived in Washington, DC, I came down with a mild case of whooping cough.

Every moment of the day, you feel like you need to cough, and when it finally happens, it is painful and a terrible sound like a goose honking is made.

There was a guy on the train coughing like that. You heard it first here, whooping cough is coming to Japan.

Baby fish are born

Several of the eggs hatched this morning. But it looks like some of the fish have already died in infancy. We'll push through tonight and see how many of the little buggers are swimming tomorrow morning.

Something is moving in the eggs!

I took out my old slide loupe to look at one of the eggs clinging to the wall of the tank because I noticed the egg had some black spots. Under magnification, I could see a tiny spine.

Then the spine twitched! I looked at a few other eggs around the tank and saw that they were also blackening. I think we'll have quite a few goldfish very soon, if the parents don't eat them.

:-D

Henry, the girl goldfish

The other day I was up pretty early in the morning and saw Henry and Red "fighting" and what seemed like scales everywhere. Henry would swim away to a corner of the tank, and Red would follow and bump Henry's sides as hard as he could.

After a few minutes of puzzling over why they were going crazy and worrying about Henry's well-being, I noticed that the things floating around in the tank weren't Henry's scales but tiny goldfish eggs. Henry was a girl!

Goldfish eggs are very sticky, so a lot of eggs stuck to the leaves of the fake plants. Seeing as goldfish will eat their own eggs, I pulled the plants out and put them in another tub of water. If all goes well, they should hatch within the next couple days. If things don't go well, the eggs will turn white and I will return the plants to the main tank.

Fingers are crossed!