So I told you I'm a fish mom...

Oh boy, here we go. If you’re following my insta, you know that I call myself a fish mom. This post is going to out me for the total fish nerd I am.

For some background, I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up for most of my childhood. I knew more about shark anatomy as a six-year-old than most people learn in their lifetime. I was so fortunate that my family was able and willing to have a bunch of interesting pets - cats, snakes, a lizard, an outdoor butterfly garden, and eventually a saltwater fish tank. We had a snowflake eel, a horseshoe crab, even a little banded shark. We accidentally bred seahorses, hand fed our porcupine pufferfish, and (hands down the coolest/weirdest pet ownership experience of my childhood) rubbed antiseptic on our shark’s nose every day after she scraped herself on a rock.

So when I grew up, left the marine biology dream behind, graduated college and moved to my first adult home, my boyfriend and I took the plunge and went halvesies on a secondhand 50 gallon aquarium we picked up from near the La Brea tar pits. Konnor wanted to do a freshwater tank, but it was going to live in my apartment at the time so I overruled him.

Two and a half years later and he’s up to his ears obsessed with saltwater ecosystems and watching every coral keeping YouTube channel he can find. I didn’t just overrule him, I converted him.

Heheh.

Our tank has been up and running for almost three years, and after climbing the learning curve, becoming experts in fish disease diagnosis and medication, and moving the tank 15 miles to our first apartment together (moving it was NOT fun), we have a pretty well-established little community of five beautiful fishies, a colorful assortment of corals, a sea urchin, and a bunch of crabs and snails.

Fish are truly incredible, and so much more complicated than we give them credit for - each of our fishies has their own dynamic personality, likes and dislikes, and place in the tank’s social structure.

Let me introduce them to you!

America’s on the right, Louisiana’s on the left.

America and Louisiana

Most people think clownfish are basic and boring, but oh my lordy that couldn't be farther from the truth! Clownfish are fascinating. I mean for starters, the female is boss. Clownfish typically mate for life, and in a bonded pair the female will threaten and even beat the male into submission - actually! It was kind of incredible looking up care info when we first got our clowns and finding forum threads like "Help! My female clown is beating my male clown to death!"

But clownfish relationships are a whole level more complicated than that - because clownfish, like a lot of fish, are hermaphroditic, meaning they can change sex. So actually, the female isn't dominant because it's female - it's female because it's dominant! Young clownfish start out male and duke it out to see who's going to be top dog, and then that fish turns into a female. Then if the female clownfish ever dies, her mate will turn female and find another male to be its mate.

If you're a Finding Nemo fan, you might have just realized that when Coral died, Marlin would have become Marla ;)

So now that I've blown your mind, on to our fishies! Konnor and I got to see this whole process in action when we got our two beautiful little clowns as babies. We had gendered name ideas for them (Rey and Ren from Star Wars, because we're nerds) so we waited to give them their names until they decided who would become female. But we had to find some way of talking about them individually, and when we started calling them America and Louisiana for the shapes of the white patches on their sides the names kinda stuck.

America came out as the dominant fish, turned female, and quickly grew to be bigger than Louisiana (female clowns are always bigger). They have such a sweet relationship - which is a relief considering all of those online horror stories I mentioned earlier. They're almost always together, and a lot of times especially in the evening we'll see them do this little courting dance in the front of the tank. I especially love feeding them because they eat straight out of my hand, and sometimes America's so ready for the food that I accidentally boop her when I put my fingers in the water.

Belle

Most fish keepers have an obsession with one specific category of fish. For me it's angelfish. It's dangerous to leave me alone in a fish store with an angel for sale, even though I already have one of my own. Belle is a Coral Beauty Angelfish, a species in the subcategory of dwarf angelfish which stay small enough to live in our tank.

This pretty fishy is so hard to get a good picture of - she’s ALWAYS moving!

Vocab term for you! When there's something visually different between the males and females of a species, the species is called sexually dimorphic.

Sexually - based on sex. Di - two. Morphic - appearances.

Clownfish are sexually dimorphic because the female is substantially bigger than the male. Other fish have different fin shapes or different colors for the sexes.

Coral beauties (and most angels) are not sexually dimorphic. We have no way of knowing if Belle is male or female. It would probably be best if we used an ungendered "they" pronoun here, but when this has come up we've opted to arbitrarily assign the gender pronoun that most closely fits the name we chose, so I'll be calling her "she".

Does her name have anything to do with the fact that we watched the live action Beauty and the Beast the night before we got her? …..Maybe.

Belle is the most dynamic personality in our tank. Fish tend to express themselves using their fins, and she is the queen of fin flares. I'll post a video at some point! From the day we got her, she wanted to be queen of the tank. Her competition? The other badass on the reef, America.

Those two go at it. There's a specific thing they do called "siding" when the fish flares its fins to look as big as possible and flashes its side at the other fish. Basically like dudes in cartoons puffing up their chests, or trying to make yourself look as big as possible to a bear - it's supposed to be intimidating. Belle sides America all the time, and they nip at each other's fins a lot. America actually took a solid chunk out of Belle's tail last week, and it's still growing back.

What's funny, and totally makes me a fish whisperer, is that when Belle's being sassy with America I hold my hand up to her against the glass and she backs off. Probably because she sees me as a bigger fish siding her.

Who's on top? We don't know anymore, we lost track. First it was America for a while, then Belle, then back to America. Now they seem to be in a snippy truce.

Artemis

….is named after the Greek goddess of the moon and hunting, and inspired by NASA’s Artemis program, which will return people to the moon and which I’m working on the lander for.

Artemis is a Helfrichi firefish goby, part of the goby family of fishes which includes over 2,200 of the 32,000 known fish species. One of the wildest facts about goby fish is that they often act as seeing eye dogs for blind shrimp that share their burrows!

Artemis is typically a pretty quiet personality in the tank. She’s the newest fish - we got her after we lost our previous firefish, Windu, who was older when we got him - and she’s still pretty shy of the other fish. She keeps to her own zone in the tank and stays out of everyone’s way.

Corals

Corals! Corals. The alien, tentacley, algae-gardening, erosion-preventing, biodiversity-enhancing cnidaria (distantly related to jellyfish) that create the most biodiverse ecosystem in the world. I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of how cool corals are here, so I’ll refer you to the Cnidariology episode of the Ologies podcast for more mind-blowing coral facts. Corals are animals, but they have a symbiotic (mutually helpful) relationship with an algae that lives inside them and provides a ton of their nutrients and energy, so our aquarium has special lighting to support the algae and keep our corals healthy. We also feed them occasionally - everything from shrimp to zooplankton. There’s a crazy weird picture of one of our corals feeding below.

Corals are fascinating and it’s been so much fun learning about how they function! My tank has everything from mushrooms and scolymia (the one eating in the picture) to hard branching corals like you typically think of when you think about coral reefs. Konnor is particularly obsessed with them, so I’m sure we’ll be expanding our collection!

Aren't fish and corals fascinating? All of the different ways their many species have evolved, their social structures, and even their personalities are mind-boggling to me. This aquarium has already taught myself, Konnor, and so many of our friends to appreciate the ocean that much more. If you want more crazy fish content, stay tuned for an upcoming post digging deeper into our corals and, even cooler, an article about how you can jump in the water and help restore beautiful coral reefs on your next vacation!

If you’re motivated to start saving reefs and fish species like mine, check out How YOU Can Save The World for tips on making sustainable living easy.