Recently Berta got the idea to pull the twenty-gallon fish tank out of the guest room and clean it up so that we could once again use it to contain fish. The tank still had little rocks in it left over from our last functional tank, but in addition to the dried scum that seemed impossible to remove from the glass, that’s about all we had.
As it turns out, a little vinegar will remove all of the scum from the tank. She removed the rocks into a little plastic trash bin (which sat like some kind of modern art sculpture on our kitchen island for a while) and proceeded to scrub the tank to good effect.
Of course, we needed to get supplies if we were going to restart the tank, since the only thing we had were rocks. A trip to Pet Smart yielded a small bounty of fish items - clean tank rocks, an over-the-edge filtration device with extra filters, an in-gravel aerator, and a heater of a size suitable for heating our tank.
We set up the tank on its stand in the upstairs hallway, and poured the new stones into the bottom. We filled the tank with water and put together the filter and heater and aerator, placing them properly in the tank.
And so, $100+ later, we’ve got a tank with heated, filtered, aerated water.
Things are conspicuously lacking to the tank at this point, though. People familiar with the construction of a fish tank know that the water must maintain a certain level of acidity (or not, as the case is) and other chemical levels. You must also have a base content of bacteria which protects the fish in the water. In addition, fish like the cycle of day and night, even if it is artificial, as well as we like being able to see them in the tank, so a light on top would probably be a good idea. Actually, our last tank required a lid of some kind because certain fish kept jumping out.
Another trip to the pet store. Note that in the time between trips, the aerator got a piece of gravel stuck inside it and burnt out. So that’s another $100+ spent on supplies, and still no fish.
Each trip to the pet store yields a stint with the cat adoption agency. There is some organization, Kitty Angels or something, that operates out of the Downingtown Pet Smart. They set up tables with cats that are available for adoption. There are quite a few. Most of them are cute and furry and look like they want to be taken home. I need to remember to keep the kids (and myself) away from the cats, otherwise we might end up with cats and fish.
And so we finally have a pH-balanced tank with a light and two working aerators (the other one just needed its gravel dislodged). Time to get fish. Back to the pet store.
We chose a school of these small zebra-looking fish for our tropical freshwater aquarium. There are ten of them. We also got two of these sunburst platys, and two ghost fish that Abby really liked because you can’t see them. I admit that there is a certain something about having fish to look at that you can’t see, but, uh… Still.
Along with the fish, we picked up a big plastic plant, a big plastic underwater house (as decoration) with matching bridge, three handfuls of live plants, and two snails. I’m not sure where the kids expected the fish to go when we sunk this giant house thing into the tank, but there you have it.
So there’s a ton more money spent on a pet that is typically considered flushable.
Admittedly, the tank looks pretty nice, even if there isn’t a whole ton of room for the fish to move in. The snails were first in the tank after the scenery and plants, and they moved directly into the house, taking it as their own. The zebra fish hang out near the top, swimming above the house, where you can’t see them unless you are the kids’ height. The platys swim back behind the plastic plant in the corner that I used to cover up the air intake line for the aerator. The glass fish are in there somewhere, I think.
Abby likes to call the platys “Spitter” because they frequently inhale and spit out everything in the tank. My suggestion to have separately colored fish so that they could have some identity wasn’t taken, so it’s difficult to tell them apart. I haven’t gotten a scheme for this myself, yet.
Thankfully, everyone is happy with how the fish tank worked out. The tank is reasonably quiet now, just a low hum at night. And it’s nice to have pets again.
