Something fishy...

So, sometime last night, the silver molly in our fish tank had babies! Glee! They're really tiny and almost transparent, basically just eyes and a tail. Max noticed them when he was having breakfast this morning, and spent all of his relax-and-get-ready-for-work time netting the little buggers and putting them in the "fry box", a plastic fish-breeding box which floats cleverly at the top of the tank. Ideally, you put the pregnant fish in there and she gives birth in the box, but sometimes things don't go as planned.

He had caught six of the babies when (around 6AM) his resolve caved and he woke me up to come see them. They're so cute! Before he left for work, I'd found one more, and gotten Max to fish it out of the tank. (Punneriffic!) Then I was of course fascinated by the baby fishies, so I stayed up for a while, and found two more stray babies! I put these in the tank and went back to bed around 7.

While I slept, I dreamt that other fish (in my dream, they were orange platties, which we don't have) had somehow gotten into the box and were eating the babies! It woke me up, in fact. So, around 9AM, distraught, I checked the fishy nursery.

There were 3 baby fish in there.

Now, I'm no math major, but it seems to me that there were 9 fish in there when I went back to sleep around 7. And then, 2 hours later, there were only 3. I seem to recall that three is substantially less than nine.

Did they get out? Did another fish jump in, eat some babies, and jump back out into the larger tank? I have no idea. All I know is that I'm missing 6 baby fish. And the guppies (which happen to be orange, by the way) have spent all day schooling around the fry box, menacingly. Of course, I have now put the previously superfluous-looking lid in place, and there have been no more disappearances.

At any rate, I now have some baby fish, and with the male and female mollies and guppies in the tank, I will doubtless have more soon. I'll try to get a picture of them as soon as they're big enough to see!