As it's Monday, and I got all politicked out over the weekend, I thought I would take a brief break from writing about politics. Perhaps I am being naughty, but earlier I received a very nice email from a reader who was actually inspired by a series of posts about my adventures in rice cooker cooking. I really didn't feel I "should" be writing about such trivialities when really serious things are happening. It's almost like when Bush was president and people were, like, you know, dying in Iraq and New Orleans or something and you had to be oh-so-serious all the time, and Condoleezza Rice got in trouble for shopping.

Plus, I spent much of the day Saturday working on my damned taxes! Unfortunately, I am not among the privileged half of the country who don't have to pay taxes, and while I agree with Dr. Helen that such a divisive system is wrong, the fact is that there are Two Americas -- the tax payers and the tax eaters.

But that's political, and this post is not. It's about a very disturbing controversy (a piscine culture war, if you must) which arose between my fish, and looking back, I see that I wrote a post about the situation nearly ten months ago. Naif that I am, I thought I had come up with a wonderful solution to the problem involving difficult fish that had trouble getting along. What I thought I had achieved was peace through applied game theory:

I have a pair of [Jack Dempseys] (each has his own piece of PVC, of course), in a tank with my Flowerhorn Trimac cichlid, which became too aggressive to be kept with my turtle, much less any normal fish. It seemed wasteful to devote an entire aquarium to a single fish though, so I thought very carefully about how to achieve a more or less peaceful balance of power, applying various game theory scenarios in my mind before deciding on the pair of Dempseys. I knew I was taking a chance as cichlids are all very aggressive fish, but in my experience, the Jack Dempsey is not quite as aggressive as the Red Devil/Trimac/Flowerhorn type monsters. The latter often can't be kept even with their own kind, and I started with two and had to get rid of one back in March. The remaining one was the wimp of the two, but now he's gotten aggressive, and I'd never try another pair of them together. The Jack Dempseys are quite larger, though, one of them is twice as large, and the smaller one about the same size as the Trimac. My reasoning was that trouble might start, but would not last, because of constantly shifting alliances. Two Jack Dempseys alone might have fought more, but together, they seem to unite against the Trimac, although the Trimac is so fierce that he's a match for either one of them. If the Trimac gets out of hand, the two will go after him and defend themselves, but they're not quite aggressive enough to attack in a completely unprovoked manner. The Dempseys occasionally attack each other, but it doesn't last, and the Trimac's attacks do not last. It's an inherently unstable arrangement, with no real alliances, but no bitter rivalries. I'm very lucky, because that's exactly what I hoped would happen. It's been almost two weeks now. A peaceful situation it is not, but I think things are close enough to achieving parity of the sort Henry Kissinger might approve.

What happened was that the Dempseys both grew up, and as it turned out, they were male and female, and they have bonded as a pair. Not long ago I noticed that they were acting strangely and would not come out of the 12 by 10 plastic Roman Colosseum hollow tank decoration that supplanted the PVC pipes and was long ago staked out as their exclusive territory. At first I worried that they were sick, but as I investigated more closely, I saw that they have been performing a huge amount of excavation inside the Colosseum. It has no floor, so they have carefully and meticulously excavated all the sand it sat upon, all the way down to the surface of the plastic undergravel filter. This is classic mating behavior, and it means they are getting ready to spawn.

Once a pair has formed, Jack Dempseys can be exceptionally prolific parents. They will dig a pit in the substrate in which eggs will be laid, and the pair will guard the eggs and fry ferociously until they are ready to be moved on. Spawn sizes can number into the hundreds. Once a pair has bred once they will continue to do so on a regular basis.

Worse yet, I learned that by keeping the Flowerhorn in there, I had unwittingly supplied the Dempseys with what is called a "dither fish" -- an unwitting dupe in a savage ritual:

Many breeders recommend adding a "dither fish" to encourage the parents to bond together against a common enemy. A slightly smaller convict cichlid makes a good dither fish. You want one they can't kill too quickly.

The attacks on the Flowerhorn began only in the past few days, but last night the violence reached a climax. I noticed that water was actually splashing out of the tank as the Jack Dempseys relentlessly smashed and bashed the poor Flowerhorn, building up momentum to slam him as hard as hard as possible from opposite sides of the tank. I couldn't stand the brutality anymore, and when I went over to look closely I noticed that every one of the Flowerhorn's fins were shredded, he was missing many scales from both sides, and he was lying on his side in a corner right at the surface. I raised that fish from a fry and I've had him for over a year, and I just couldn't let this continue, so even though I don't have room for another aquarium, I nevertheless cleared off some space and set up an emergency 10 gallon "hospital tank." He was just lying there spent, and so easy to catch that I didn't think he would make it through the night (he still might not make it), but I knew he would have been dead if I didn't intervene. So I put him into the new tank, added a fake mermaid-on-a-rock hiding place that had been in a salt water aquarium (salt can benefit sick fish) and I treated the water with Stress Coat to help him heal. When I went to bed he was on the bottom of the tank, barely moving, and this morning, while he looked like the most seriously beat-up fish I had ever seen, there was clearly some new liveliness in him. Like one of those pugnacious pit bulls I've read about that would be nearly killed in dogfights and manage to survive.

Here's how my rescued "dither fish" looks right now:

It's nice to have an occasional diversion from politics.