EJ the fish

I took a couple of pictures of EJ, subject of yesterday's post, this morning. This first one shows the red in his fins nicely. He's a dark blue, so the red fins give a really rich appearance, very royal I think.

He's so funny--he'll swim around and kind of hover on my side of the tank unless someone comes through the door, then he reorients himself so he can watch whoever came in. It just really amuses and astonishes me that he's so interested in what's going on around him.

His fins are spread a little more here, with that graceful sweep, and you can see the blue at the root of his tail fin and the edge of his belly fin. And yes, those are pictures of the Ts reflected there--sheer accident that it centered on EJ so perfectly!

He's doing so well at bumping my finger that I'm wondering if there'd be some way to rig it so he could ring a little bell... ;-D

I'm so easily amused

You'd think sometimes I'm about 6 years old.

We have an "office fish." EJ is a beautiful beta, dark blue with long fins that sometimes show red. The other secretary brought him in and I was like, "oh geez, a fish, dandy"--unimpressed and unenthusiastic.

Well--he's a very social fish! I didn't know fish could be social. But he just droops and sulks if he's put in a position where he can't see people. He especially likes to be on someone's desk where, if there aren't people coming in and out, he can at least watch the person at the desk. So while she's out after some surgery, I'm "fish-sitting" to keep his spirits up; his tank is on my desk.

And being me, I'm incapable of being around a critter without interacting with it, esp. if it's one that shows some interest in being interacted with. He's so cute; he gets so excited when I come in in the morning (because it's breakfast time!), and about half an hour before home-going time he starts hanging around the top of his tank, because he knows he's going to get his dinner pretty soon (who knew fish had a sense of time?).

So this morning I dropped a crumb of food in and then I slid my finger into the water just a little bit, gently so as not to startle him, and waited. He kind of swam around it, and then came up and bumped it. Being a beta, he was probably seeing it as a challenger, but when he bumped my finger, I dropped in another crumb of food. Repeat, repeat. So I'm teaching him to bump my finger to get food. :) He blew bubbles at me (beta males make bubble nests).

I'll try to take a picture of him.

(One family I used to cat-sit for had an African frog named Alf--they're aquatic, so he lived in a 10-gallon tank. I used to greet him by name when I came in and he started responding to my voice by swimming to the top of the tank. Frogs get sticks rather than crumbs, so I taught him to take food sticks from my fingers. Cool. :)