Fish Tank . . . Part III

It's official. We are fish keepers! We drove to Bozeman yesterday to bring the newest members of the family home. We now have 15 fish in a 90 gallon tank in our kitchen-living area. You can add this to the 6 horses and 3 dogs that we already feed . . . Oh, and the fast approaching HUMAN child that will be making her debut in 9 weeks. Somehow however, we have a feeling that the fish might be a tad bit lower maintenance than all of the previous and impending children. Oliver alone is more maintenance than the horses put together.

After 2.5 weeks of "curing" the tank with Latoya Jackson (the gold fish) we added 13 African Cichlids and 2 plecostomi (is that plural for plecostomus? Can't find it in spell checker). African Cichlids are some of the oldest freshwater fish in the WORLD!






The fish we purchased are all "F-1" fish (before yesterday I had NO idea there was such a classification). This means that they are "first generation" fish straight out of one of 3 African Lakes that cichlids can come from: Lakes Malawi, Tanganyika, and Victoria. Their parents were actually swimming in these lakes in Africa - then they were born outside the lake. Now they are in Montana. If they were to be inspired by love while in our care and reproduce, those babies would be "F-2" fish. Karma is an interesting thing!




We have 2 Electric Blue Ahli's (bright blue and stripey), 3 Electric Yellows (name implies what they look like), 4 Niyeri's (will be super colorful with stripes and neon), a blue Mumbai, a Convict Cichlid (looks like it's wearing prison stripes), and 2 Yellow and Black Striped fish that like to spit rocks who I don't know the name of either. Plus the two bushy nosed suckers and we couldn't part with the our "loaner" gold fish so we kept Latoya. They are all pretty tiny right now and they will grow to be 3-5 inches or so - God willing.

Oliver is still enthralled with the tank and likes to watch it, Gaucho sleeps under it (we think the soothing sounds calms his OCD), and Pete invited friends over to see the fish last night and then after they left red his book and stared at them for hours. I think everyone is very happy with the Tank.

I awoke super early this morning panicked about what I don't have for the baby yet and I was happy to find not a single floater in the tank!

Who has some fun NAME IDEAS for the fish? Please leave your ideas in the comments section!