Look at That "S" Car Go!

Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight... razor... and surviving.

—Apocalypse Now (1979)

-----------------------------------

One of the things that I truly enjoy about having the house in Parkville is having more space. Specifically, having a space to keep a decent-sized fish tank.

I'm the sort of person who would rather have about twenty small fish in my tank than two or three big ones, so I've got a pretty good mix going on in there. And now that I've got the Badass Gourami out of there, it seems like everyone's getting along, so that's cool too.

I go for as much realism as possible. No little plastic divers in there for me. I use live plants, real rocks (although I do have a fake piece of driftwood in there), a couple of pieces of coral I got in Florida, and a few giant barnacles. And, even though they tell you that you shouldn't use it, I put real sand in the bottom of the tank, which I mix with pebbles. And then I'll find an interesting rock or two and throw that in as well.

A couple of weeks ago we were, oh hell, I don't know, somewhere in the Towson area. We were in a Red Circle Boutique picking up something or other, and as we circled around I spotted a PetSmart. I realized that I needed to pick up vacation feeders for while we were in Florida, so we stopped in. In addition to the vacation feeders I looked into the plant tank to see if they had anything cooler than the stuff they sell at Petco.

I asked the girl there, who appeared to have a pretty decent clue, if she knew whether the plants in the tank were genuine aquatic plants. Here's something I learned the hard way: many of the plants that the big pet chains sell aren't aquatic in nature; they just look kind of cool and that's why they don't live very long. So you do have to ask these things, as it turns out. She pointed out a couple and I said "great, wrap 'em up."

Not long after that I discovered that I'd also purchased a couple of stowaways.

At first, I thought that the new plants were fragile and/or weren't taking root. I kept finding pieces of them drifting through the tank or floating on the top. Then I saw the two little black things on the glass. Is the charcoal coming out of the filter? No...wait. One of them is MOVING.

Son of a bitch. I've got snails in my tank and they're eating the plants. So far I've found four of them altogether. The plants seem to be recovering, but I get the feeling that there may be one or two more. 

Comments

[dena]

It kills me when they sell standard houseplants as aquatics. Drives me nuts. I'm getting ready to set up my second tank again, and want to do community fish only. We have two silver dollars in our current tank. They are eleven years old, and we cannot put anything else in there but bottom dwellers.

Those gouramis are pretty, but boy are they feisty!

[yellojkt]

My brother in law has a salt water aquarium with some pretty cool fish. But it sure is a lot of trouble to maintain.

[Claude Call]

Yeah, that maintenance angle is probably the only thing keeping me from getting a salt tank. In some ways I'm truly a lazy ass.