February | 2018 | anotherdayinparadise

It’s been a while since I reported on our fish community. We’ve had a death in the fishy family, which was most unexpected. Silver Streak, the show-off Koi, a real shining star when it came to doing laps in our pond, was MIA one morning at feeding time.

As the pond is inside our screen-room, there was no possibility that he’d been carried away by one of the many birds in our backyard, so we were thoroughly mistified as to where he’d vanished to. Hubby had a feel under the rock where they go to sleep at night and have siestas in the afternoon, but found nothing. A couple of days passed and then he spotted something glinting in the rockery surrounding the pond. It was the stiff and lifeless body of Silver Streak, who had obviously taken a corner at breakneck speed and flipped himself right out of the water, landing underneath a Bromeliad. His cries for help went unheard, and he’d expired forthwith. Hubby had to throw him in the lake, which, I suppose, is the equivalent of us having a burial at sea.

Blue Flash, the other koi seemed very lonely without his mate, so we bought a new friend for him to race with. I named him Shadow, partly because he’s grey and also because he stuck so close to his mentor for the first few days whilst he got used to his new surroundings. I guess the pond seemed positively palatial after the small tank in the pet shop and even more so after the plastic bag he rode home in.

Five of the six goldfish are doing splendidly and have grown quite fat. Marilyn, with her red lips and blonde head and tail, is especially greedy. She nudges other fish out of the way as she sashays around, making sure she gets more than her fair share of food.

Poor little Freddie, the smallest goldfish isn’t doing too well. He’s not as active as his friends, and spends a lot of time down amongst the plant pots, just dreaming the day away.

When he does appear, he swims sideways, as you can see in my first photo. He doesn’t have much of a tail and his fins are very sparse, so he can’t wiggle his butt and flap his fins like Marilyn and her admirers. He just seems to drift around like a boat without a rudder. Occasionally he makes a supreme effort to right himself in order to get some of the fish flakes before they’re all snaffled up by the others, but as soon as he gets bumped in the fray, he does a nose-dive down to the bottom and it’s a while before he can gather enough strength to get back up again. I feel so sorry for him and wish I could crochet him a set of fins and a long swishy tail, but hubby says that probably wouldn’t work. I keep hoping that one day his fins will grow and he’ll be fat and strong like all the others.