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Back in 1995 or so we decided we wanted to have a fish tank.
We did a little research and settled on a 50 gallon freshwater system and got started.
It was cool stocking it with fish and setting up the plants and rock and stuff.
We had plecostomuses (plecostomusi? plecostomooses?) and other catfish, hatchet fish, neon tetras, you name it. We even had some African Dwarf Frogs in there.
We maintained it, cleaned it, added fish when some would pass away. We even nursed some fish back to health after the developed some kind of scale eating fish rot.
During that time we moved twice, the second time being when we bought our house in 1998. The aquarium moved with us and that my friend is no easy task.
After several years our interest and dedication to the tank waned. Fish that passed on to the great beyond were briefly mourned as they were flushed into the hereafter, but were not replaced.
Eventually all that remained were 5 bottom dwellers. Some catfish and a loach.
We were ready to give up being fish tank owners. The problem was that I simply didn’t have the heart to take 5 perfectly healthy fish and just flush them away, but having a 50 gallon tank seemed like overkill for that small number of fish.
I decided to buy a cheap 10 gallon aquarium and transplant the survivors so that they could live out their lives with minimal upkeep in an out of the way corner of the house.
Before long old age took it’s toll and 3 of the five remaining bottom dwellers passed away, leaving us with the loach and a catfish which both survived up until about a year ago.
Now there is just the loach. We call him “Loachy” and on one of his active days he looks like this:
For the most part, though, he tends to literally lay around the bottom of the aquarium on his side looking very dead:
Sometimes, like in the picture above, he is in among his rocks. Other times he’s just laying around out in the open on the white gravel.
Let me be clear, he’s not sick. He’s lazy. This fish has been sleeping or resting on his side since the day we got him oh so many years ago.
He’s the last fish, and when he’s gone we’re done.
I don’t know how long he’s going to live.
I will tell you he was in the original group of fish we bought when we started.
That means he is 11+ years old if you just count the years we’ve owned him.
For all I know he’ll go another 11 years.
