the fish is a male betta. he is red. he doesn’t have a name yet. i picked not the most gloriously finned or color-saturated one but the one that moved around in his little cup the most. half-moons were 9.99 and he was 7.99.
done: got fish, gravel, food, conditioner from international aquarium. got jar from jen-mei. got kit from greenPLUR on etsy. the kit was just clay pebbles, a plastic basket, and a wedge of growstuff. very simple.
washed clay and jar and gravel. conditioned tap water, waited overnight for it to get to room temperature, plopped the fish in this morning!
todo: see if i need to remove the plastic nautilus shell decoration. maybe he wants a water plant instead. i think he should have something to hide behind if he wants.
omg! i got a circus fish! i put him on the table so my siblings could see him in the webcam and he’s super interactive and swam through his shell several times! BEST FISH!
name ideas include
jupiter because he’s red and i like space and betelgus is too obvious as a red star
xiao xing xing as in “little star”
athelas because that was the name of my red-haired male blood-elf paladin, after the king’s herb in lotr, because paladins heal. this is a good name because he will grow an herb.
update about the fishy: the cats knocked over the jar onto my laptop. $299 repair (cheaper than the $1100 it would have cost if it didn’t have applecare+.) but di saved the kingsfoil as he flopped about on the cutting mat on the table and grabbed him and put him back in the jar. i put some more water in slowly over the next week. he is fine!
he lives very high up now over the sink where cats can’t reach. lol.
fishy is still alive! i never did the garden part at all. (last year, i saved the roots of some green onions and attempted to grow them sorta, hoping i’d transfer them to the basket of clay balls above the fishy’s home, but i let them rot after not changing the water in the little dish i was keeping them in, so i gave up on that experiment.) so for the most part there was just nothing on top of the fishy.
in the new place, we put him on the kitchen counter. a month or so ago, i observed Lucy sitting up on the counter, watching the fish. as i watched from the couch, she moved her head from the side to the top of the jar, and slowly reached up and dipped her paw in the water. it didn’t look like she was trying to catch him or eat him. it looked like she was kinda playing with him. but i can’t pretend to know her mind. after seeing that, i put the mason jar lid on top of the jar haha. i didn’t screw it tight, because the fishy needs air i think, and it would be annoying to unscrew it every day to feed him. i just leave the flat part of the lid on top of the jar. he doesn’t blow bubbles anymore (i wonder if he only did it when the sun hit his jar in the old place? i think maybe he wants to be warmer?) but he does still swim up and down when i visit him.
Glad fishy is still alive! I think you could buy or make a mason jar lid with holes in it… I think since mason jars are very cool there are lots of accessories for them lol
