Salty

[muninnhuginn]

So today we lost a catfish. Not a big deal when we've a dozen or so of them. But this was Salty, one of the first pair of peppered catfish we got (yup, the other was called, inevitably, Pepper: The naming of fish is... often not bothered with at all to be quite honest. Often you can't tell one from the next.). Salty came with Pepper, whom we were given for free 'cos he wasn't looking desperately healthy. He lasted a couple of months and his death, the first we'd had, was marked by many tears from Looby Loo. We got two more peppered catfish (one died, one--Mini--is still very much around), plus a couple of the albino variety (Hamlet Senior and Banquo). They've got character, zipping around like chubby little submarines with a neat set of "whiskers". They're big enough and ave distinctive enough markings to be recognised as individuals, unlike, say, the zebras, who we regard as a shoal (or is that herd?) and merely note how many appears to be male (skinny) or female (rounded). Of the named fish, Salty was the one we'd had longest, and one of the few to last over a year.

The horrid thing about finding him was trying to get a definite ID. Some of the newer catfish (mostly unnamed) and cory have a roughly similar shape, are only a little larger, and have similar markings. I couldn't get hints from fins or "whifflers" as the darn Siamese Algae Eaters (these are the fish that literally go pale with rage) had already started stripping the corpse.

Burial tomorrow when it's not so wet out. And I shall once more pause in my task to wonder why all the liminal stuff--items for recycling to be taken out of the backdoor to the boxes; recycling boxes to be taken through the house and out over the front step; corpses to be taken from above ground to below--is my job.