Fry on Friday

[sammigold]

My new guppie had a fry tonight. I say "a" fry because I was watching at the time.. She was hovering around the bottom of the tank and one of the males was paying very close attention to her 'booty'. I said to my man " she is either about to give birth or she is not very happy" and just as I said that , out popped a baby. Just the one and it swam off and I haven't seen it since ( think it was eaten :oops: ) Anyway I watched for another 10 minutes and I didn't see her have anymore. Is that weird or what? I thought they have about 30minimum at a time. (but then I suppose it takes time...how long I wonder?) Anyway that was pretty exciting and pretty cool 8-) :D

[mcloughlin2]

Guppies are awsome....i have a male and three females and about 12 babies.... :D

It takes hours for all the babies to be born.....

Ps: Luv the "Fry on friday" heading.. :wink:

[Darth_discus]

good work sammi

i have always been interested in their tales, but i don't seem to have any

[Littlefish]

Interested in tales…

Well – let me tell you about the lungfish I had years ago.

Sometime about the middle of the 1970s, the Department of Fisheries (or whatever they called themselves then) decided to extend the range of the Queensland Lungfish (Neoceratodus Forsteri). To this end they rounded up a few hapless specimens and turned them loose in the North Pine River at Lawnton, just north of Brisbane.

Now it so happened that the kids living next door to me were fishing just downstream of the release site and managed to hook a small ceratodus, which they brought to me for identification before they ate it. They agreed to part with the fish (and keep their mouths shut) for a modest monetary reward.

I know, I was a bad man, I should have returned the fish to the river, but I was excited. I had never seen a lungfish outside of the old Queensland Museum (where a couple of neoceratodus languished in concrete aquariums) and I was determined to keep it.

The lungfish proved surprisingly undemanding, eating just about everything from worms to green peas, and tolerating rather grubby water conditions. I became very fond of him (for some reason it looked like a male) and named him Harry (don’t know why).

I had never thought of lungfish as sociable beasts, but Harry seemed to enjoy having a mirror in his aquarium, apparently thinking he was looking at another neoceratodus.

When the water was very dirty (as was often the case, since I was a busy young man) Harry would come to the surface and take big gulps of air. In fact he seemed as happy breathing air as water. This gave me an idea.

I gradually reduced the amount of water in Harry’s small aquarium and introduced more vegetation for him to creep about in. Harry seemed quite happy with the situation and I noticed that he was using his limb-like flippers to walk about. There came a time when the water level was so low that I had to replace the aquatic plants with sphagnum moss, but Harry seemed unperturbed as long as he stayed moist.

Harry had been leading a more or less terrestrial existence for some time when an accident with a vacuum cleaner destroyed his aquarium (well more of a terrarium now). I moved him temporarily into an old cocky’s cage lined with sphagnum moss, and kept meaning to move him back into an aquarium, but other things kept distracting me.

Then one day I came home from work to find that Harry was dead.

My wife (who was then my new bride) had seen it happen, but had not been able to reach Harry in time. Harry’s cage was hanging in a tree in the back garden (to protect him from cats) and my wife was on the verandah.

Apparently Harry was playing with his little mirror as usual, but when he reached down to ding the little bell, he slipped off his perch, went head first into the water dish and drowned.

True story.

Fred :|