Caution: This blog entry contains talk about death and toilets.
Our oldest son expressed an interest in having fish, so one of his Christmas presents this year was a 5-gallon aquarium and accessories along with a gift certificate to buy some fish. Things did not start out all that well- I put the thing together to quickly and didn't follow the advice of letting the tank settle for a couple of days before we introduced our first five Neon Tetras to it. Long story short, we had our first death within a couple of days. Unfortunately, we could not find it and just assumed that it was subjected to filter death. Which turned out to be a fatal decision for his 4 remaining buddies.
Turns out, the dead one was pushed down inside a plastic plant and probably had Neon Tetra Disease, which quickly spread and caused the other fish to croak. They sure had some interesting swimming patterns before they each ended up getting flushed.
That experiment failed, I rinsed everything down thoroughly and let it all dry off before rinsing it all off again and this time letting it dry for a week. Then we refilled the tank (and bought a new heater cause the other one seemed to not want to turn off and make the water really, really hot) and waited a few days. Then we again bought 5 neons, but this time added an algae eater to the mix. Three weeks later, it's so far so good. Our temperature looks good, as do the pH levels. All the fish have survived so far and the only trouble is some cloudy water.
I'm thinking that's because we had been way overfeeding (very easy to do when there is only a few tiny fish), but we're slowly changing out the water (about 1/3 at at time once per week) and that should help. The fish even appear to have grown since we've had them.
One thing we've learned is that with a 5-gallon tank, once one thing goes wrong, your tank will pretty much be toast because there is so little room for error. And that it doesn't take much to mess things up. But we'll keep on tryin' to be good fish hosts and hopefully not have to use the toilet too much for other than its real purpose.
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