gwax's rumblings

So, I’m sit­ting here watch­ing Mr. Tickles do his thing and it occurs to me that fish make for extremely good pets in col­lege. The best thing about fish is the ease of tak­ing care of them. I feed my fish two or three times a day and then every few weeks I have to change some of the water or change the fil­ter. Compare what I have to do to what some­one with a dog, cat or rodent has to do. A cat owner has to change the kitty lit­ter fre­quently, feed the cat, train the cat to use the kitty lit­ter and make sure that the cat never man­ages to get away. The owner of a dog has to house train it, take it for walks, pay atten­tion to it and so on. Rodents are much closer to fish as far as atten­tion needed to keep them alive, except that their cages need to be cleaned more thor­oughly and more frequently.

There is, how­ever, one slight prob­lem with fish, notably, it’s harder to get a fish that’s inter­est­ing and has some per­son­al­ity than most other types of ani­mal. The solu­tion to this prob­lem is found in one of two ways: select­ing your fish very care­fully or get­ting lucky; I man­aged to lat­ter. So, as might have been inferred from the begin­ning of the pre­vi­ous para­graph, Mr. Tickles is my fish. Tickles (as I refer to him when I don’t want to bother with many syl­la­ble) is a Tiger Oscar (Astronotus Ocellatus), of the fam­ily Cichlidae (the cich­lids). The note­wor­thy thing about Oscars is that they’re large aggres­sive fish. Right now, Tickles is about 6″-8″ and will grow to about 10″-15″ even­tu­ally. His per­son­al­ity would be hard to clas­sify as he’s got quite a bit of it for a fish (I got lucky), but suf­fice it to say that he’s a rather fun char­ac­ter and I’ve really taken to him.

That Tickles is aggres­sive and big means some amus­ing things in the future. Supposedly, his breed of fish will not only eat most things (liv­ing or oth­er­wise) but will also eat crea­tures up to slightly larger than him­self. This of course will be great when I get off my lazy ass and hunt down some other fish for him to eat. I would have done so before, but dif­fi­culty arises in that many fish carry dan­ger­ous par­a­sites and the feeder fish at the local PetCo™ carry fatal ones to oscars. He does eat sushi, left­over Chinese, hot­dogs and all sorts of other such things.

All in all, I’m quite fond of Tickles and very glad that I got him.

Oh yeah, this one time he bit Kurt; that was funny.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2004 at 11:36 pm and is filed under animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.