Our beautiful Fish Kids! :)

So today, I want to introduce you to our lovely fish family. :) We have three fishy homes for our fish babies, two downstairs and one upstairs. The one right above was our first tank we ever bought and sits right in our living room where everyone can see. It's this tank where we have our growing guppy family and our "Plectasauraus." I will tell you more about him later. :)

In our other two tanks (which i don't have picutes of) the main attractions are our beautiful blue lobster and our freshwater sharks.

Our fihs journey has been a bit of a sad one, as when we first got our tanks, we lost quite a few fish. In total, we've had over 70 fish, and now we are down to right around 30. Acutally, we have more than that now, because our guppies just gave birth to about 13 new babies...

Each of our lovely fishies have names, and you are now going to have the priveledge and honor of knowing every single one of them! Here's our list:

O-Shen II is our amazing and beautiful blue fresh water lobster. :) He spends a lot of his time in his little log, but when he gets super hungry, he comes out and swims around the tank with his blue hands wide open to catch any little food pieces that he can get his hands on. We used to have three schools of fish in his tank, but now we are down to about one because he caught and ate all the other ones! Our first lobster, Oshen I died before he could grow old with us. We are hoping that Oshen II can live a long and happy life in his beautiful fish tank home in the Olson house.

We have a school of what we call the T-Bone gang in Oshen's tank. I forget what type of fish they are. We used to have four, but one of them died, either of old age or became food for Oshen II.
T-Bone, who is the leader of the T-Bone gang, Femur, and Skully. We lost Coccyx.
Here you can see two of our T-Bone Gang, T-Bone and Skully

We also have another school of fish, most of whom have become lunch in this Oshen's tank. These ones are similar to the T-Bone gang, but they have a yellowish spot on their bodies. Our living survivor is Kilimanjaro. We lost Everest, Wilhelm, and Fuji.

Moving onto our next tank...

This tank, as I said ealier, was our first tank and houses all our guppies. We probably have gone through the most guppies out of any fish. We originally had a large school of guppies, but not one of them stayed alive, except one of their children, who we named Remnant. He is a bright orange fish - the one you see darting past the log. We then bought two females, one named Bella, and one named Luna and got one beautiful male named Sol. So right now, there are two males and two females, but over the past couple months, our fishies have been busy and we now have a HUGE school of new baby guppies!

Our main male guppy - Sol. Underneath Sol is Sundrop, one of our original fish we bought.
Right now, they are all too small to name, because we would never be able to tell them apart, so we will wait until their colors start appearing. There's a possibility that some of them are so small that they might get eaten by the other fish, but that's ok too, that's what happens in a fishy fish world. We started off with about 15 healthy babies, but now there seems to be more around seven or eight, but its always hard to see them since they are so small and see through. They can hide in any plants and we would never see them.
In this tank, we also have a cory catfish. We used to have two, but sadly, one died. His name was Woof. Our remaining Cory is named Meow. Meow is right below between the orange plant and green tuft of grass.
We also have two larger catfish. I don't know their official type, but they are catfish. We have had these two guys for quite a while. They are fun to watch and both have strong personalities of their own. Their names are Roar and Purr.
Then, we have our famous "Plectasaurus." We can never remember his real official fish type, but it sounds like Plectasaurus, so that's what we call him. His name, however is Shadow Leopard. He is really shy but he comes out and shows his beautiful self every now and then. I have to say, I don't think I've ever seen such a beautiful and graceful fish. Here is Shadow Leopard again - we were able to grab our cameras and capture him in the short few minutes he decided to come out. When we got him he was probably only about an inch long, but now he's about three or four inches and still growing! We love him so much!
Our Plectasauraus Fish - Shadow Leopard. Above him is Remnant to the left (our only surviving guppy from our original guppy population) and Sol to the right (our main new male guppy)

Our final fish in this tank is another unknown type fish. We used to have three of these brightly colored fish, one red, one orange, and one yellow. Over time, two of them have died (I don't know why, maybe just old age) but one still survives! She is one of the original fish we bought! Her name is Sundrop. We lost Flame Thrower (the vibrant red one) and Love Song (Our orange one).

Our third and final tank is upstairs. This was our latest addition to our fish family because we had some very aggressive "Cow Fish" as we called them in our guppy tank that we believe were responsible for killing off our original guppy population. We then moved them to Oshen's tank, but they just chased our poor lobster around. So, we knew it was time to get them their own tank.
So, we went out to find our Cow Fish some buddies. We started off with two Cow Fish, named Milk and Milkerton. One was pregnant (though we didn't know at the time) when we bought her, and so we ended up having a whole crew of beautiful new Cow Fish who we named Milk Dud, Chocolate Milk, Milkshake, and Half'n'half. Once we moved all the Cow fish to their new tank, I think the stress of the move was just too much on Milkerton and Milk, and they both died once they were moved to their new home.
We also bought a couple brightly colored orange and white fish. Again, I don't know what their actual fish type names are, but we named them Sorbet and Sherbert. You can see Sorbet swimming in his new home in the picture below.
Sorbet
We also got a couple freshwater sharks. These are by no means real sharks, but they look a bit like a shark, which is why they got the name they did. These two are named LongLong Man and Bus Kananka (Both are in Tok Pisin).  Finally, we got two fish that are bottom eaters, although they are not cat fish, and I just can't remember what type of fish they are either. Sorry! But, their names are Tigris and Euphrates.

Here are our two freshwater sharks (they both survived the Filter Horror) Long Long Man and Bus Kanaka
The story of this tank is VERY sad. Our filter is a top notch pebble filter, making it pretty powerful but also very effective at keeping the tank clean. Somehow, one day, the safety grate got unattached and began sucking all our fish into it and then killing them. We began to notice that some of our fish were missing, but we couldn't figure out where they were. So, I did a complete search of the tank, but still, no fish. I thought that maybe they had died and decayed and the other fish ate them. So, we just let the tank be. After awhile, the tank started stinking and the water was really murky. So, I decided to take the filter out and figure out why it wasn't working. It was then that I made my horrible discovery. As I was cleaning out the filter out poured Euphrates, Sherbet, Half'n'half, chocolate milk, and milk dud. So, we didn't lose all our fish, but that stupid filter did take away the lives of many of our innocent baby Fishies. Now, we have our sharks, Long Long Man and Bus Kanaka, one of our Cow Fishies - Milkshake, one of our bright red fishes - Sorbet, and one of our bottom feeder un-catfishes - Tigris. Right now, we're deciding whether we should join our upstairs fish tank with our downstairs fish tanks since we lost most of our population due to the filter. However, the fish in the upstairs tank are all more aggressive, and we are worried that if we move them, they will annoy the fish in the other tanks. Eventually, once out baby guppies grow a bit bigger, I think we will move some of them to Oshen's tank (maybe he will catch and eat them) and some to our upstairs tank, but we'll see.

Anyways, that's our fish babies for you!We are excited to add more to our family if our guppies decide to make more babies, and we mourn every one that dies. :( We have a little fish graveyard out in our front yard underneath our flowers. We hope we won't need to put any more there for a VERY long time!