Rob has been studying for tests daily. Since the start of the school year, he has had a test every week. Being in a competitive ivy league school, his class average is in the 90s which leaves no room for procrastination.He studies alone throughout the nights while I'm asleep. He wanted company, so he came up with the idea of getting pet fishes. I was completely against it, because I didn't want the responsibility of keeping a living creature alive. In my memory, fishes die very easily. In the end, we went to a pet store and shopped for fishes.
We must have spent an hour debating if we wanted goldfishes or tropical fishes. If it was up to us, we would have mixed it. Since we can't, we decided to buy 2 black moors because it stood out the most to us. We called it chubby wubby. Although it is a type of goldfish, they are very high maintenance. We left the store spending $70 without any fish.
We wanted to keep it simple and put it in a fish bowl. However, black moors need to live in warm water temperature, so we purchased a heater and a 10-gallon glass fish tank. Then, we had to buy small goldfishes (aka tester fish) to build a friendly environment for the black moors. However, before we could do that, we had to run our empty aquarium for 24 hours with spring water.
Okay, 24 hours later and an empty tank in the living room, we went back to buy a dozen tester fish. It has been only a week, and there are only 5 tester-fish and a murky aquarium. There were several possible problems - the ph level of the water and/or overfeeding -- not to mention, we murdered our first tester fish.
One day, one of our fish looked sick. It was swimming/floating on its side. We read online that they may have been overfed. So, we fasted them for a day. A day later and there was no change. We came across another article that suggested that the water may be too cold. It suggested that we separated the sick fish and put it in a warmer temperature to generate movements. We took sickie to a separate container with water that was warm to touch. Sickie revived and generated much movements! In a matter of seconds, however, it died. I think... we cooked it.
After our lesson, we plan to purchase water conditioners which can bypass a week of changing water and watching fish die. However, are we really ready for the black moors? Black moors might be a little difficult to flush down the toilet. (Note: the tester fish are only half the size of my pinky)
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Update (11/20/2008): Apparently, the feeder/tester fish were supposed to die. Anyhow, we're on round 2. This time, we decided to keep some tropical fish. We are most likely going to keep some type of shark. They are easier to keep.
