It was Sunday night and I had gathered a few friends to have a get together as my roommate was to celebrate her birthday the next day. The night was interesting as we could not gauge what time she would be back in the dorm, and we had gotten ready to say surprise at least five times. When the time came, we were all sitting in the dark in different nooks and crannies in our dorm. Lexi opened the door and nobody jumped out. We all stalled because no one had planned how we would come out at once. Disappointed with the surprise, I kindly asked my roommate to try coming in again. She obliged and her response to our “elaborate” surprise was: “oh wow”. We all laughed and figured that would have been the highlight of the night, to our surprise that was minor. Lexi opened her gifts and she had received the one gift that “keeps on giving” as my dad had called it. I thought I would be a good roommate and buy her a fish that she has been contemplating buying since I bought mine about a month ago. I gave her the fish in a cute decorated tank and just as I had set the tank on her desk something was floating in the water. I had said something along the lines of “oh and he just took a poop, you’re welcome”. We both laughed about it for a second but then her fish, previously named Finley, started wiggling around furiously. Then Lexi said “Um Amber I don’t think that’s poop”. We quickly realized Finley was having babies! What an experience, everyone in the room was elated at the sight. However, we quickly started panicking as we had no idea how we would take care of the babies.
Our friends began researching, and we read that the babies will be eaten by the mother if we left them in the tank with her. So, we decided a trip to Walmart at 10pm was necessary! We bought another tank for the babies, and we separated them that night. We did research on what the babies eat, and we found that they needed algae. Since we had just gotten the tank, it was spotless, so we began crushing the fish food into tiny specs hoping the babies will feed off of that.
We have 20+ babies now, and we are really hoping that they will all make it in this world. Either way, Lexi insists that this was among one of her best birthdays, and she was happy that we had decided to celebrate it.