101 Guppies

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Josiah

Contributor at Our Paradoxology

Josiah's soul finds a voice on the piano and through guitar strings and he is on his way to becoming a masterful musician. He loves to get to know the characters in the biggest, thickest book series he can get his hands on, and is now finding his place as the lead character in the epic story God is writing of his life. Stay tuned for his posts on cool creatures in Thailand and an American teenagers' take on Thai food.

Latest posts by Josiah (see all)

• Taipei, Taiwan (Part 2) - August 2, 2024
• Taipei, Taiwan - May 15, 2024
• An Unplanned Trip to Laos - March 6, 2024

My dad has many jobs at Zoe International. At the beginning, one of them was designing a water filtration system for fish and frogs (for the kids to eat). One day, when he looked into one of the pools that they were going to put frogs in, he saw a couple dozen guppies in there. To this day we have no idea how they got there. Maybe some eggs were in the water and maybe a bird dropped some in there, but there were a ton of guppies in there. My dad got a small net and a movie popcorn box and filled it with water. Then, he caught about thirty and put them in the bucket.

They were in there for about two weeks before Dad got a fish tank for them.

We put in our living room and my dad filled it with aquatic plants. We wanted an all-natural tank so we selected a few of the fish to stay and dumped the others in the canal behind our house. Since then, the fish have given birth and so have the snails that got in because of the plants. (I am not a very good photographer but if you look closely at these pictures you should see tons of little babies.

We aren’t done yet. We added some algae eaters to the hundreds of creatures in our tank. We added an ugly Suckermouth Catfish named Argus Filch and two pretty Siamese cleaner fish named Bobby and Kreacher. We also added several shrimp but they’re impossibly good at hiding considering that they are bright yellow and blue.

The guppies are not the first pet fish we have had in Thailand. Only a few weeks after we got here we stopped by a fish market and bought a beta fish we named Malfoy. We didn’t want to be late for some baptisms at Zoe that day, so Malfoy swam contentedly in a coffee cup in our car while during the baptisms. When we got home, we put him in a small vase with a floating plant on our kitchen table. Sadly, the beautiful Malfoy died one morning for an unknown reason and the dining room table was empty for a few months. Fortunately, when my dad went to the market for the cleaner fish he also got Bellatrix Lestrange, a small dark blue beta fish who only cost one baht ($0.03 !!!!!!!!!)

Still, while Malfoy was our first indoor pet fish, he wasn’t our first fish in Thailand. Week one we noticed that there were big fish in our canal. We have a big canal that goes through our neighborhood and right behind our house. In it there are giant, bright orange koi fish and numerous other fish we cannot identify. Almost every morning at around 6:30 our neighbor dumps a bunch of fish food off her patio and watches as a mass of wiggling fins goes crazy right under the surface of the water.

P.S. I do not have pictures of the koi fish in the canal because they are very camera shy.

P.P.S. We have had several pet fish in America and we know what we are doing (for the most part).