[Elspode]

Three tanks, here. Two 30's, one a tall, one a long, and a five gallon bowfront plexi minitank.

The bedroom 30 tall is a community tank, home to two very large silver dollars and an assortment of skirted tetras, tiger barbs, green barbs and a single something else that we can't remember right now.

The upstairs 20 long has two rather enormous, voracious Oscars and three small pink convict cichlids.

I've been into aquaria for about a decade, I guess, virtually all with South American cichlids of some description or other. I tried Africans without much luck. My longest-lived fish have been a pink convict male who lived nearly seven years, and a Jack Dempsey that lived about five. My wife's tank is the one in the bedroom, and her Silver Dollars are about four years old. We have a pleco that was hitting about eight inches in length in that tank, and was about four years old when he croaked.

The three remaining pink convicts in the upstairs tank are the offspring of the previous residents, BTW. We had a thriving, reproducing community of pink convicts in that tank for about five years, breeding to the point where we could take bags full of them to the pet shop and swap them for food for the rest of 'em. Eventually, they stopped breeding and attrition brought the tank down to those lone three. It was then that I got the two Oscars for a change of pace. When I got them, they were about the same size as the convicts, and so there was a standoff. The Oscars are now approaching eight inches in length, and the little guys hide a lot.

The smallest tank is in our office, and right now holds some neons, some other neon-sized, but non-neon tetras, and one Betta.

We're a menagerie as well, here. In addition to the fish tanks, we have four cats, a dog, two finches (who reproduce - we have just given away four babies this past week), two parakeets and a cockateil.