Should Have Seen That Coming
Brown is not into fish. He’s made it clear that he won’t leave me per se if I get an octopus, but he will move to his own place and send for his stuff. Something about an octopus’s ability to crawl out of the tank and walk around on the floor and the walls weirds him out… sheesh. No accounting for taste. So he can be forgiven for an entirely different and unfamiliar train of thought when I complained about catching my yellow tang.
After a string of odd sentences hammered down the miscommunication (“I can’t fit my tang in the Tupperware!” “I don’t even know you any more!”), I explained to him that adding a lemonpeel angel to the tank before removing the tang (“It is a fish with barbs on its tail, and the barbs are called …” “Oh!”) was a huge mistake. Yellow tang + yellow angelfish = territoriality conflict.
Oh well, I figured, Bambi was going back to the store as soon as I made the time to catch her, so I’d just make the time right then. Sure, I had planned to trap her and avoid breaking down the rockwork, but how hard can it be to catch a yellow tang?
(You need a montage here, but of a woman in various states of fury, waterlogging, and undress and redress over the course of sixteen hours).
The tang was eventually caught by breaking down the rockwork and using acrylic dividers to cut the tank in half. Bambi was then herded to a small corner and, mainly by pure luck, she swam into the net. Since the store wouldn’t be open for several hours, I moved her into the refugium and turned off the skimmer and pumps: she might be cramped in the 20g ‘fuge but she wouldn’t freeze or suffocate.
Message of the day? Both Bambi and the lemonpeel angel were impulse buys and I’ve never had success with impulse buys. They cause too many problems and make me waste far too much time.
What most people don’t realize is that setting up your tank the right way is extremely easy to do. I’ve been maintaining freshwater aquariums for over 25 years!
to all fishy people out there… this week’s episode of bones takes place in a tropical reef tank. you can catch it on hulu.com if interested.