The aquarium was fun. Sal got a good kick out of it. And fell asleep pretty much as we finished up the entire free part of the place. He woke up to cry in the car, but that’s another story.
It was neat to watch him track the fish. And turtles – those were fun for him too. Jellyfish, though pretty – didn’t seem to be moving enough to be interesting. Track lighting was more interesting than jellyfish. And the eels and sturgeons stuff – well – how young can you be to have nightmares?
My favorite fish continue to be trigger fish. And puffers. We saw lots of both. The puffer reminds me of our little guy – three-pea. Its also how I picked Sal’s background. Three-pea and Sal have a connection, though neither really know it.
Catherine and I took along time preparing for a kid. Not sure it worked, but it was some sort of practice. We started out with sticks. Then plants. Then fish. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we can sustain lives other than our own. We had some barbs and they are hearty fish. We kind of stacked the deck. But then moved on to get little frogs. They’re really cute swiming up and taking an air bubble in and playing with their bouyancy. And then the store had a little fresh water puffer fish. He was tiny. And cute. When we got him, he was about the size of a pea and a half.
We were supposed to feed him live worms. We figured all the fish and frogs would thrive with the live worms. So we’d goto the store 3 times a week to buy live worms. We’d have a bag of live worms in our fridge. We’d drop the worms into the tank and let them float down and be eaten. We’d also slide them down a straw so that they’d get down to the frogs before being eaten.
Then three-pea ate the frogs.
The frogs were just gone. But our puffer had grown. It was a pretty neat exhibition of the conservation of mass.
And then a little while later, we had some algae issues – cause the worms had crawled into the rocks and died and decomposed and that wasn’t so good.
So we experimented with cleaner/sucker fish. They didn’t really help. So we got snails. They did help. Snails actually move kind of fast. Or – at least faster than I had thought. And it’s fun to watch them draw lines around the glass in the algae, eating it up.
Then one morning we noticed our snails didn’t have perfectly round feet anymore as the crawled along the glass. There were little chunks missing. Little bite marks.
During the day, three-pea would be fluttering around, cute as hell with his little flippers spinning quickly as he hovered around (he could swim backwards…) But at night, man, we never saw it, but he must have been a terror on all the other animals in there.
Barbs started losing fin parts. The gourami’s fins and whisker things were getting trimmed to. The snails had become only shells of their previous selves.
Snails are supposed to reproduce like crazy. They’re usually a bad thing in the aquarium, cause they lay eggs and then get out of control. We (me mainly…me and my god complex) figured that we could create an ecology that balanced the snails and our three-pea. But three-pea ate the eggs too. He was thorough. He was motivated to get up to three-peas.
I don’t quite remember how three-pea died. Lack of worms. Lack of other animals. Bad ph-balance in the water. But he did pass on. And then a year or so later we got Chapo (that’ll be a story for another day. it involves a little shadyness with a jewelry store) and we’ve just sort of been moving up the evolutionary ladder ever since.
Anyway – yesterday, as Sal was looking at the puffer fish at the exhibit (easily 20-30 peas big these guys were) I thought of how they were linked. And was reminded I’m a bit strange. Then Catherine commented on how cool the puffer fish were they way the moved – she called it helicoptering.
And I had this vision that got me all warm inside – well, it was a three part vision. First, I was buying a remote controlled helicopter. Then, I saw Marco and Sal building it. Then they were out at the park down the block flying it.? Marco’s always wanted a remote controlled helicopter…