And now for the article about fish

Heheheh! Surely after coming up with a blog name, the next hardest thing is coming up with the second post. Particularly since its only 10 mins since the first post, and I really haven't gotten up from my seat, let alone got on out into the world to live a little. Apparently its necessary to write at least 2 blogs per week to keep your readership interested. Probably a good idea to just get this one out of the way early, then as Petey says, i can just 'put it to sleep'.

So, i'll write about our fishies. Specifically i'm worried about Garry. We've only had him for just over 24 hours and already he's our favourite fish. He's a kissing Gourami, so he has these big luschious lips which he uses to suction off all the algae off the glass, which not only looks cute, but is extremely useful. All the rest of those layabout tetras only seem to eat fishy food, leaving me to take care of cleaning the tank.

So Garry has become very popular in the tank. At the same time that Garry joined our 'community' we took home Buffy. Buffy is an Angel fish (we're so good at fish names!), and was hanging out with Garry in his home tank in the store. The weird thing is that Buffy is hovering around Garry, possibly just as concerned about him as what I am. He's just lying there at the bottom of the tank. I'm not sure if he's just gone out too hard on the algae-eating, and just needs to sleep it off, or whether he's on borrowed time.

Now, in answer to the question, do fish sleep? Yes, yes they do. Or at least they do something like sleep. They have no eyelids, so of course its all eyes wide shut style. But they don't need to be moving in order to get air over their gills for breathing purposes, as apparently most sharks do. Interestingly sharks also don't have that bouyancy gland the swim bladder that other fishies have, so they have to constantly swim or sink. They do however have a huge fatty liver that accounts for 30% of their body mass and adds to their bouyancy. And probably their ability to hold their liquor.

Fish are so cool. And even better is the word aestivation, which is like hibernation, but in summer. The canny lungfish, not only can breathe air, as well as use gills to extract air, but they can slow down their metabolism to 1/60th of their normal rate, coat themselves in a layer of mucus and wait in the dried mud of riverbeds breathing only through a little tunnel to the surface until the rains come again. Come to think of it, i think hibernation is much more sensible, why miss out on the greatest season of all, summer? But then i'm not a fish. I blame Mandy and her spelling bee (definitely very addictive) for my new-found interest in cool words.