Ms Fish
I’ve had a fish tank at my parents’ house for a long time, but my last fish just died recently. She was a silver dollar fish, and I believe that she was around 13 years old. That’s 13 people years, not fish years. When we cleaned the tank out, there was a sticker on the bottom that said it was manufactured on December 14, 1992, which would make the tank 14.5 years old. She’d been the only fish in the tank for the last 10 years or so, outliving all the others by quite a margin. She was originally one of a pair of silver dollar fish that I purchased, but I think she might have eaten the other one or at least some fish in the tank ate the other one. She had a few wide vertical stripes, which an aquarium book that I found indicates that she was a female. And she was pretty big, maybe 4 inches from nose to tail.
She was surprisingly aware of the goings on in my room. The tank overlooked my bed, so I could see her in the morning, watching me sleep, wondering when I would wake up and feed her. When I finally did start to move around, she would rush back and forth expressing something a little bit more than just hunger, until I finally fed her. It was a little bit disconcerting to wake up with a fish staring at me, I never was able to teach her proper manners, and yet waking up just won’t be the same without it.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:51 am
Sorry to hear about your fish. You’re right though, fish can be quite aware of their surroundings especially when it comes to feeding. My fish go crazy when I walk by and they’re happy to eat out of my hand now that they’ve realized what it’s there for.