…And Death

Just as the tadpoles have been turning into frogs and all of that going well… Brandy found Heracles was no longer with us. Heracles is the big guy in the picture. His un-named friend had died last year. Both had been with Brandy for many years. And Heracles had made friends with Icarus (the new guy). You can see how much the liked each other in the picture. Icarus followed Heracles all the time and imitated him.

Heracles had seemed fine, so once again this was a bit sudden. He was fine… and then he wasn’t.

We had a brief ceremony and buried him in the back yard. Poor guy.

But then, a little later, we found that in the other tank… oh, background. The litte fish in Brandy’s tank (not the plecos) started having babies a couple months ago. The tank got so full of babies that we got a second tank and moved about half in there. For that tank we got two more baby plecos. One was an albino that died after just a few weeks. The second looked a lot like Icarus (the baby in the tank with Heracles).

So anyway, a few hours after we found Heracles, we noticed that the one left in the new tank was nowhere to be seen. That isn’t entirely unusual, as he had been known to hide in his castle for days at a time. But then Brandy saw… a clump of snails eating something. After a bit of looking we determined that it had to have been the pleco. He was almost gone. And we couldn’t take him out, because we would have gotten snails too.

This all happend on Saturday. It was a sad day.