M.I.A. and Fry

Sorry for the long delay in posting on my blog, but I was pretty busy last week, what with work and this interview thing for the Temple program that I applied to.

As many of you may know, I started a fish tank in March. After an initial massacre due to the filter wheel not spinning, I restocked with eight fish and things have been going fine Last night, my dad wanted to move the tank because he is doing hardwood flooring in the room where we have it, so he decided to try and move it and the stand while it is full. It's only a ten gallon tank, and the stand has wheels, so it wasn't really a problem. We got it moved with only minor splashes, and I went to feed the fish when I noticed that Harry, one of my male turqouise guppies didn't come up to the top to feed as he usually does. I could not see him anywhere. I thought perhaps he was hiding under the little rock cave that I have in there, but I lifted it up and he is nowhere to be found. He's literally disppeared. Now I could have sworn that I had seen him earlier in the day, but I'm not definitely sure of that. How does a fish just disappear an aquarium with a hood on it? I have three theories:

1) My fish was cannabalized by his tank mates, more quickly than if I had put him in with pirahnas. Now it seems odd, as they've all been in the tank for the same amount of time and they are all community fish, and if anything thing the larger fish are females and get harrassed by the guppy males. He could have died, I supposed and his tank mates could have eaten his carcass, but I don't think they had enough time to do that.

2) He might have come out of the tank during the splash during the move, but I didn't see anything on the floor near where the splash occured. The only way that he would be completely gone is if he splashed out and Paul ate him, which I wouldn't put past him, but again the hood was on the tank and it wasn't that big of a splash, and most of the fish were hiding at the bottom.

3) He was raptured for the coming fish apocalypse. This is actually what I'm leaning towards, and I think that I'm going to start a religion based on it, hopefully I can make it into a money making scheme a la Scientology.

In other news, my two platy females are popping out baby fish like it's their job. Currently, the count is up to 7. This too was puzzling as each species is all of one sex, but apparently female fish who are live bearers can store sperm from mating for quite some time. So basically my female fish horded sperm from the males in the tank at petsmart and are now popping out babies. At first there were only two, and then over the weekend I found three more, and yesterday there were two more who came out of hiding when I lifted up the one decoration.

The search for Harry and more baby fish will continue.