Frogs iz durty

Alex got a fish last summer. A betta. We started out small, with one fish in a simple 1-gallon fishbowl. The problem with a bowl that has no filter is that it has to be cleaned every week.

That got old fast.

So I picked out a larger, but still modest, 5-gallon tank that came with a filter. The good news with this set-up is that we only needed to clean the tank once a month. That I could handle.

Plus, the larger size allowed us to add a few more creatures. Bella bought a snail with her own money. Alex bought a tiny catfish and a frog.

They all seemed to love their new home.

I kept careful records of when we cleaned the tank. Before the first month with the filter had passed, the tank was already looking pretty dirty. But I held out for the one month mark, because I wanted to be efficient. Like clockwork.

When the one month mark arrived, I cleaned the tank, the rocks, the fake plants, the filter. The tank was filthy after a month. When I poured the water out in the tub and sifted the rocks into a net, it smelled like a putrid fisherman's wharf. Really nasty. But after a thorough cleaning, it was perfect. You could almost hear the fish sigh with relief as they were placed back in their pristine tank.

And then the frog died.

I don't know why the frog died. It may have been completely unrelated to the tank cleaning. It may have been a congenital defect. Maybe it was something he ate. I don't know.

I cleaned the tank again after the dead frog was out, just in case any dead frog essence remained in the tank. If I was a betta, I wouldn't want to be swimming around in the cloud of my dead ex-roommate. The catfish and the snail didn't care. Bottom-feeders.

We meant to have a proper funeral for the frog, whose name was Rainey (the betta is named Sunny and the catfish, who is milky-white in color, is called Cloudy...sorry, the meteorology names end there. Bella's snail is named Shelly). Rainey's corpse sat floating in a plastic container on the bathroom counter until everyone got tired of seeing it, and Alex's emotional attachment had ended. Rainey got flushed.

But here's the amazing part of the story.

A month went by after the post-mortem tank cleaning. Things were really busy and I didn't get around to doing it on the one-month mark. Besides, the tank looked fine. It looked just as clean as when I had first cleaned it. Soon we got to the 2 month mark. Now I really felt like I was pushing it. But things got busy and it got put off. It's easy to put the fish tank low on the list of priorities, and there was always something else that needed doing that bumped it on the schedule.

It had been over four months since I cleaned the tank, and this morning I decided I'd better stop pushing my luck and clean the tank.

And you know what? It wasn't even that dirty.

I mean, sure. It was dirty. Cleaning it was the right thing to do. But after four months, it wasn't even close to the level of dirtiness that it was after one month when the frog was living there.

Which leads me to one conclusion.

Frogs iz durty.