The Fish

We got a fish tank for Christmas this year. Nate and I were so excited about the kids having their first pet. The day after Christmas Nate took Liam and Jonas to Walmart (the only place in town where you can buy fish) to pick out the fish. They came back with one Gourami and 3 Mollies. The lady at the store told them that one of the Mollies was pregnant, which sounded really exciting until we found out that they can have a lot of babies and that they will keep reproducing rapidly.

The pregnant Molly

We read that you are supposed to put the babies into a separate tank so the mom won't eat them but we couldn't find any of those little breeder tanks with Walmart being our only option. One day she didn't look pregnant anymore but we didn't see any babies until a few days later when there were about 3 swimming around. When we looked more closely at the rocks on the bottom we found quite a few dead ones. Shortly after this the Gourami started getting sick. When we looked up fish sicknesses, it seemed to have everything! We got some fish medicine and kept going through cycles of the medicine but eventually they all died. We waited a few days, cleaned the tank, pretreated everything and started over. Within days our new fish were showing signs of the same sicknesses. We were talking to our mechanics who live down the street (kind of sad that we have gotten to know our mechanics so well - more on that in a later post) and they were telling us that they had problems with keeping fish alive. They found out it was the water. Basically, it is horrible and you have to buy some special treatment to make it so fish can survive. So after the last of the fish died we have put the fish tank on hold. But here is a picture from when it was all good...