Ok, yes, this picture is exactly what it looks like: A ton of blurry little baby fish swimming around one of their proud new parents. It is getting a little out of control. I mean, I know it is spring and everything, but for these guys to spawn twice in  2 months seems to be a little excessive. Does anyone want some convict babies? We have about 300 more than we can take care of, at the moment.

I would be moving these little guys in with their older siblings, over the weekend, but it turns out that I will be working the whole time. I was barely able to talk my way into coming in late tomorrow, so that I could run the Brooklyn Half Marathon. Sorry to be complaining, but this situation is stressing me out.

These little guys have been doing great. They are eating twice a day, now. I moved the mama back to the large tank, so she could be back with her homies, and resist the urge to cannibalize any of her young. This week some of them have started to develop their little convict stripes.

These little guys have graduated from eating random detritus to eating ground up veggie flakes. They are also looking like actual little fish, instead of tadpoles or something. They still don’t have a lot of color. But they are very cute and curious. When I get close to the tank to look at them, they all swim over to look at me. It seems like there are about 15 or so that have survived this far. I hope that they are all big and strong enough to make it, now. At least none of them have to worry about swine flu, right?

Last week, I moved the mother convict and all of the fry into a smaller tank, in our kitchen. I thought that they would at least have a chance, in the other tank. Last time the convicts spawned, the other fish had eaten them all in a couple of days. Initially after moving them, a lot of them swam down into the larger gravel and became lodged, or met their demise in other ways. I was pretty bummed, thinking that maybe it would have been better to just leave them in the larger tank to fend against the other fish. I expected them all to have died by the time that we got back from Boston. When I got out the net to move the mom back to the large tank, surprisingly, I noticed that some of the fry had survived. They had even grown a little bit. They move around pretty fast, so it is tough to catch them on camera. They are the little blurs in the image above. The mother is as protective as ever. She stands guard up against the glass, like in the shot below, when ever I even get close to the tank. With a little luck, some of them will last.

Reagan and I have been watching the pair of Convicts in our fish tank, flirt and dig for the last couple of weeks. They have emptied all of the substrate from an area of about 1 square foot, in the back corner of the tank. They piled it all up around their little nursery, like protective walls. We could tell that they were probably going to spawn. Yesterday, Reagan said that she saw the male convict take on Tina (the oscar), who is about double its size, and scare Tina away to the other side of the tank. After hearing this, I suspected that they had probably already laid eggs somewhere. I wanted to try to see them, if I could. So I closely inspected that little corner of the tank. It was really cute to see how nervous they got, with me close up against the tank like that. They were ready to fight. At first I couldn’t see anything. But then I noticed the female herding some little fry back to the pack. She has them all tucked away in a little nook of the rock that sits in the back corner. If you couldn’t see them in the photo above, here is a close up.