PART 6: DISASTER STRIKES!

The water in the fishbowl was slightly cloudy and smelly. It was time for a water change. I just wanted to postpone that by a day. My intention was to observe how the fishes reacted when the water quality was bad. I wanted to check the threshold (How far the fishes can survive the bad water quality). One of my friends had a fishbowl that accommodated two not-so-small goldfishes. He changed the water once a week! A week was too long, I thought. I wanted to check (through experimentation) if it was fine to change the water in my fishbowl once in every three days. I always think, sustainability is the key. The frequency at which I changed the water was not sustainable, I believed. I wanted to make the routine a little lighter on me (and on the fishes as well). Changing the water was always a stressful experience for my fishes. And, there is another truth about it. The smaller the aquarium | tank | bowl, the more you have to do to maintain it. That is why, it is always better to go for the biggest tank possible.

So, that day, I skipped changing the water. It was a Saturday. I, along with my wife and daughter, went shopping. We were back at home by 4:00 PM. I have a habit of just watching my fishes. I especially take a closer look when I reach home after staying away from home for a couple of hours or more. That day, after reaching home, I took a look at the fishbowl and noticed a dead molly! I was worried and felt guilty. I took the dead fish out and examined it to ascertain (guess) the probable cause of its death. I thought, three factors were responsible for its death: Bad Water Quality, Malnutrition and Stress. Goldfishes, in general, are messy. So, with goldfishes in the bowl, the water quality deteriorated really rapidly. Mollies, in general, really do not do great in that bad quality of water. When I fed my fishes, goldfishes, with their big mouths, used to just grab pieces of food and devour. Sometimes, mollies were left with no food to eat. Those mollies were really smaller in size compared to the goldfishes. So, the former could not overpower the later to snatch some food, most of the time. Frequent water changes were really stressful for the mollies. Fishes fall sick, and even die of diseases, when stressed.

I thought, it was not too late and decided to buy another fishbowl to accommodate the mollies exclusively. I brought a 15-litre fishbowl for the purpose. However, I thought, just 3 mollies would not be a good enough population for that bowl. I decided to get a couple of male black mollies. The three I had were females. Surprisingly, even after visiting three aquarium (fish) shops, I did not find male mollies. They said that it was out of stock. Then, after some reading and wondering, I thought of getting a few Platies, instead. I brought home 6 platies. One of the remaining mollies suffered from Dropsy and died shortly afterwards. I moved the remaining two mollies to a quarantine-tank to isolate them from the goldfishes. Those two mollies did not survive long and died one after another within the next few days. That’s how I lost all my mollies! I was left with just two goldfishes. I did not want to lose any of those. But, the story was not going to be over with the death of all the molies. More deaths were there on the card NEXT!

PART 6: DISASTER STRIKES! by Debi Prasad Mahapatra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.