Prairie View

Monday, November 10, 2008

Gone Fishing

One fish in the bunch Hiromi brought home last week for the aquarium looked pregnant, according to Hiromi's and my analysis. Grant asked, "How can you tell if a fish is pregnant?"

"The same way you tell if a woman is pregnant. If she has a fat belly."

A few days later Hiromi dug out the aquarium nursery (a square net affixed to a metal frame which can be suspended from the top edge of the aquarium while dangling in the water). He netted the pregnant fish and put it into the nursery.

Once before when we had the same kind of fish, and it began dropping babies from its lower abdomen into the water, we hurried to put the mother and babies into a separate gallon jar after we spied some of the other aquarium residents feasting on the new babies. The mother proceeded to have many more babies, but she did not prove to be a loving mother. The next morning only four babies were left. Lesson learned. Do not leave mother and babies together. Mother will eat babies.

We kept checking on the mother-in-waiting in the aquarium nursery. Nothing. Till tonight, when Joel walked by and peered into the aquarium. "Uh. I see a baby fish."

I was on the phone, but I scurried to the kitchen for a large white plastic powdered-food-supplement container. I put water into it and handed Joel a dry ingredients measuring cup to use for scooping out the babies into the container. He saw four fish at the beginning, but like the occasion of Jesus feeding the 5,000, the fish kept multiplying. Joel kept fishing and dipping until there were more than 20 baby fish in the container. They could swim just fine, but they soon settled near the bottom, presumably a good place to hang out if everything else in the aquarium is bigger than you by a factor of at least 25.

Hiromi said, "Why don't you check on the internet and see how long she's going to keep on having babies?" I did, and learned that it can take a few hours or even a day. When there was a lull in the birthing activity, and Joel's dipping finally caught up with the mother fish's producing, we decided to put her back into the main part of the aquarium. If she was going to have more babies, we'd let nature take its course. We dumped Mama out of the nursery and then dumped the babies into it.

On the way to learning about the duration of labor in fishes, I learned other interesting things about fish babies. They're born four weeks after fertilization. The mother "shimmies" before giving birth. It looks just like it sounds. Hiromi had seen it earlier this evening and didn't know what it meant. Baby brine shrimp or infusoria (very small microorganisms that live in water) is the proper food for most baby fish, although some will survive on very finely crushed flaked fish food.

I don't expect to get up with the babies tonight. Thankfully my days of doing that are past. Even then, I'll be acting much more responsibly than their own mother did. I'm not even tempted with gulping them whole. Aren't you proud of me?

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