One down, one to go?

Yep. Speedy croaked sometime last night or early this morning. I know he was alive around midnight or so last night, because I checked on the girls before I went to bed and both fish were moving around the tank. I also chased Inky out of the room, as I wasn't entirely sure what her intentions were. I noticed that the can of fish food was on the floor, so obviously she'd been investigating around the tank and had knocked it off. Poor Speedy probably had a stroke, seeing Inky's nosey black face stuck up against the side of the tank.

I have to say that I'm not surprised that the fish didn't last the week. Who knows what kind of shape they were in when we got them in the first place? I doubt the pet shop was prepared to give away dozens of their best fish out of the goodness of their hearts. Combine that with a couple of adults who have little or no knowledge about the appropriate care of fish and you have a fish funeral in the making. For instance, did you know that you really shouldn't keep fish in a fish bowl? Did you know that the general rule about tank size is that you need 1 gallon per inch of fish? We did not know these things.

Darren and the girls came home on Saturday with a very cute little fish tank. It had a purple lid and pretty purple stones and a cute little plastic tree. The orange fish looked very happy in their new home. Except that they were breathing funny, I thought. I said to Lauren "Hmmm...have they always breathed like that?". They seemed to be gulping non-stop, which did NOT look normal to me. Lauren looked at me with great compassion (evidently heartbroken that I have lived for almost 40 years without any knowledge of how gills work) and then explained to me how fish breathe. So I let it go, not wanting to alarm her, but I did tell Darren about it. He wondered if maybe the fish were just stressed about moving from the bowl to the tank, and we decided to wait and see what went on.

In the meantime, I googled some stuff (I think that half of what I know, I have learned from the internet). Probably it would have been a good idea to have googled calculating tank size for goldfish prior to the trip to Walmart. It turns out that the fish were likely doing the weird gulping because they were looking for more oxygen. Whoops. I shared my findings with Darren, and we decided that we would probably have to get a bigger tank. We figured we'd look into it early in the week, what with Monday being a holiday and the stores all being closed. Too little, too late for Speedy.

So this morning before school, an impromptu flushing funeral was held for Speedy in the downstairs bathroom. I'm not sure if any words were spoken over the Bowl (Darren handled the event), but I do know that Emma asked for prayer at devotions this morning. Oh dear. Here's hoping Lauren's doesn't bite it anytime soon.