The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention… we left all the fish in Anne’s care during the month we were in France. Our two female platys and one of the tetras managed to die (it’s not Anne’s fault, she’s the Fish Goddess!), so Anne replaced the platys with two female Mickey Mouse platys. One of the remaining male platys vanished the day we picked up the fish, so now we’re down to one very happy red platy schooling with two voluptuous females that happen to be double his size!

The official count for the ten-gallon tank is now: one red platy, two Mickey Mouse platys, one pleco, one cory cat (one of the remaining two mysteriously vanished a couple of months ago, and four neon tetras.  The Our Pets page has been updated with the latest information, for your reading pleasure.

Well, one of the cory cats is about to die.  He’s been really listless lately, his skin’s been getting really dark, and we noticed that his fins were getting a bit ragged… apparently he was letting the other fish nibble at them without complaining.  Just now, I found him being sucked against the tank filter, not moving, and I thought he was gone.  But when I tried to net him out of the tank for his funeral, he came back to life and started zooming around the tank like a spastic chimpanzee… but in more of a berserker fashion than anything else.  At times, he was swimming upside-down.  He finally came to rest on his side, at the bottom of the tank (after having taken a breather against the tank heater, also on his side), so I fished him out and put him in his own little bowl, covered by a glass cutting board to protect against cats, to await the end.