I Had Cannibal Fish

Meet Goldie, Hon, and poor Algae!

When I say cannibal fish, I don't mean fish that they eat people. All fish nibble on human flesh and some people mistakenly call them cannibals. Biting people just means they eat meat. Cannibalism means you eat your own kind.

These fish were pets that my sisters and I had as as children. Goldie, Hon and poor Algae. There are things about fish that you may not know. One of the things they don't tell you about fish is that they can become or are naturally cannibals. It depends on the breeds, how many times you feed them, things you feed them and other things like that. This can cut the time you have your pet if you are not careful with them. You might think that fishes are easy animals, but like all pets you should do research before you buy them.

Honestly I don't remember their names it was over 25 years ago, except we did call the one Algae. I did draw these pictures of them along with all the other drawings of fish. I didn't take pictures of them when they were alive. I didn't have a camera I was 6 or 8 years old. my drawing became to small per their new rules, but Pixabay.com has my back when it comes to high quality pictures and vector images.

It's important to feed your fish everyday. They swim a lot everyday and burn a lot of calories and if you skip a day, your fish might turn to cannibalism. When I was young me and my sisters had three fish and a snail. The last fish and the snail were both algae eaters, and it was their job to keep the tank clean for all the fish. One day we got up and Algae was gone, we asked our parents if he had died during the night, but they were as baffled as we were. We blamed a sister for giving them a taste for blood when she fed them brine shrimp, but the truth is if you miss a day of feeding your fish they will turn on each other. Well it was a murder suicide, because we were afraid that they would kill any other fish that we placed in the tank and the snail couldn't handle all that algae and they all died.

Don't be sad we had them for about a year and gold fish normally don't live much longer than that.

A member of my church had gone on a business trip and he has a hug tank with lots of tropical fish. He left his children in charge of feeding them, though they had been pretty good at the task at hand, they had accidentally missed one day, only one day. Well...he had one missing fish when he got back.

This is not uncommon, I recently checked my poll results in this article and more than sixty fix percent of people taking the poll have had cannibal fish in the past.

One thing you should consider is that you can't mix certain types of fish. There are freshwater fish, saltwater fish, cold water, warm water tropical fish and these types of fish cannot be kept in the same tank.

There are types of fish that even when you have the same breed they are territorial, like female Bettas fishes if you have them in a group of three or less they will bully one of the fish sometimes to death. I've heard if you want this fish you should have more not less, but I'm not sure about them. There are fighting fish that you can never have in the same tank.

So learn about the breed. The type of water they need and what other breeds they mix well with. Always, Always, always feed them everyday. And don't depend on only the algae eating fish to clean the algae in the tank, because if something happens to that fish like what happened to ours, the rest of your fish might die as well.