Despite our never having been fish-tank types, my wife, Sharon, and I bought one for our daughters when they were little. Among the first batch of fish was a very aggressive one that took out every friend he had in his little glass-walled world.
We named him Killer. He was black and gold with a turned-down mouth that gave him a permanent “leave me alone” expression. And that’s just what we did. For several years he swam around his 5-gallon cube on a singular mission of completing what must have been the normal lifespan for a small black-and-gold fish.
After Killer finally went belly up, we drained the tank and decided it would be our last foray into fish enclosures. The girls briefly set up the dry tank for hermit crabs, which was not so entertaining. After that ended, the tank lived in a closet until daughter Noel refilled it a couple of years ago.
No fish this time around. She needed Killer’s old digs to rescue an axolotl, which is a Mexican salamander that can look like it’s wearing costume feathers.
We had never seen such a thing, and neither had Noel. It was living in a nasty tank with shallow water when she found it. After purchasing the little monster from the previous owner, she named it Tina.
Recently, daughter Carly acquired two tiny axolotls, one of which was close to being named Killer before she gave it to her sister Julia. All three of my daughters now live in different cities and have single-occupant, fishless fish tanks.
Unlike other amphibians, axolotls reach adulthood without undergoing metamorphosis. They keep their gills and remain in water. The species originated in lakes around Mexico City, where urbanization, water pollution and invasive species have driven them to near extinction.
I learned those things and more from an article about axolotls published late last year in the New York Times. The story said that although axolotls raised in captivity have flooded the aquarium trade, “it is now questionable whether any significant wild population remains.”
The story said that at last count, 10 years ago, there were 35 axolotls per square kilometer in the Mexican wetlands. The per-square-kilometer population was in the thousands during the 1990s.
They’re endangered in the wild, but not in my daughters’ fish tanks.
Carly named hers Squirt because it was not growing as rapidly as its bullying and biting companion. The bigger axolotl was eating most of the food (yummy bloodworms), and Carly was concerned that it might eventually consume Squirt as well.
Sharon and I delivered the larger one to daughter Julia during a recent visit to her home in Murfreesboro, where it continues to thrive and grow with all of the bloodworms it can eat. She named it after the lead singer for Guns N’ Roses, Axl Rose, who has a similar name and costume feathers.
I only regret that it took so long before we learned about this pet that lives so well in fish-tank solitude. I think I might have enjoyed introducing one to a certain black-and-gold fish I used to know.
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