An addition to the family

We suffered another small bereavement a little while ago. Not on the same scale as my Mum, of course, but closer to home, at least in a geographical sense.

One of the cherry barbs developed dropsy and had to be humanely euthanised (i.e. transferred to a small bowl of water and left in the freezer for half an hour). This, coupled with the mysterious loss of another fish somewhere along the line (eaten, presumably, although there was never any evidence), reduced the number of cherries to 7 and started me thinking about adding another shoal of something different to the tank.

So on a recent visit to the aquatic centre to gather more food supplies for our fishy friends, we dropped into the basement to see what was on offer, and found these:

They're red ocellated barbs, and they look even more attractive IRL than in this photo.

They also have the added advantage that - being barbs - they should mix in with our existing cherries just fine.

Which is exactly how it went. After a short period of argy-bargy, the new shoal of five all settled down and got along swimmingly (*cough*) with the other seven. For the first few days the ocellated crowd were *extremely* excited at feeding time, rushing up to the surface and gobbling the food while it was still floating. I guess they don't feed very often at the shop. Within a few days they'd realised that food was going to be a regular feature of life in the new place, and calmed down a bit.