Do your fish ever do something that amuses you? If so, how about sharing your stories with the rest of the membership? Here are a few from my experiences, and yes, they are true.

In my young teenage days in Brazil I built a pond. My mother bought me some angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) for the pond, and one of them was the biggest angelfish I had ever seen. Being in a tropical country meant bugs were plentiful and all flies that were swatted inside the house were thrown in the pond for the fish. We also had a nest of paper wasps behind the house. One day I discovered I could pick up these wasps as they drank from the pond and crush the thorax before they could sting my fingers. So when I was bored I would sit by the pond and wait for the wasps to come for a drink. I would pick them up, crush them, break them in two to feed to the fish. One day I wasn’t so quick and one wasp started to sting me. I tossed it into the pond quickly and the large angelfish came up to eat it. I should also mention that we had two comet goldfish (Carassius auratus) whose hobby was to take food from the angel. Well, one of them took the angry wasp just as the angel was about to eat it. The goldfish stopped near the surface, then splashed violently and raced along the length of the pond rubbing its mouth on the bottom. It had been stung! The goldfish lived and continued to steal food from the angel.

Another time a friend of mine came across some fishermen at the river and he brought me a gift for the pond: four armored catfish (Callichthys callichthys). They liked the pond but were not happy when I cleaned it once and placed them in a shallow metal pan we used for carrying wet laundry. They panicked when I came by with more fish, slid up the smooth edge of the pan and landed on the floor of the veranda. Then they proceeded to race across the floor and into the grass of the front yard. My friend and I spent frantic minutes chasing catfish on dry land.

On my last year of university studies I owned a beautiful blue male Betta. He was such a hit with my roommates that we named him Max Headroom. He was no ordinary Betta for besides getting carnations from a secret admirer at Valentine’s Day he would come out of the water to take freeze dried tubifex worms from my finger. I would break a piece from a tubifex cube, wet it in the tank water and stick it on the tip of my finger. That was Max’s cue to come up and get a treat. I would raise my finger slowly and he would come up to half a body length out of the water and take the tubifex from my finger. One day I decided to try the same trick with frozen brine shrimp. Well, the shrimp were not as bulky as the tubifex so Max bit the corner of my finger. Unwilling to admit his mistake he hung on to me. I must have been quite a sight trying to shake a Betta off my finger. I recall feeling many small sharp teeth trying to get a chunk of my finger. Though he couldn’t cut though the thick skin he did leave a red circular bite mark. That was the end of our fancy feeding for he decided that it was much easier to eat food that is not attached to fingers. I don’t blame him.