Frequently Wrong, Rarely in Doubt

It started innocently enough.

“I think I’ll get a betta,” I said one day, like a rational person. A sleek little fish. Low maintenance. Pretty colors. Very zen. You know, a living art piece.

I bought the tank. I bought the betta. He was beautiful – black and white. I even bought a little leaf hammock so he could lounge like the aquatic royalty he clearly was.

But then I thought, “He looks a little bored.” So I got some shrimp. Just a few—a little cleaning crew. Very practical. Functional shrimp.

Now the tank wasn’t big enough for Oreo and all his friends. I got a bigger tank. I got a pleco. I got more shrimp. With this expanded landscape, Oreo decided that, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, he preferred to hunt rather than be fed. To hunt shrimp, specifically. 

So I set up a dedicated shrimp tank. Yes, a shrimp tank. The goal? Create a sustainable buffet of live snacks for Oreo. Because clearly, what this $12 fish needed was a personal shrimp concierge service.

But then guess who moved in? Snails. At first, it was one or two that came as hitchhikers with some plants. Cute, slow-moving, harmless. But you look away for one weekend and suddenly it’s a mollusk metropolis. 

So I did what anyone would do. I got a pea puffer tank. Pea puffers love snails. They’re adorable murder balloons who treat a snail infestation like an all-you-can-eat brunch. I was a genius. A visionary. Until…

They ran out of snails. You see the problem. The snail tank became… not enough. So I started buying snails to restock the first tank to breed more snails to feed the puffers who were supposed to get rid of the snails.

Perfectly logical. But pea puffers also need variety. And these particular puffers are also in the “dead food is for suckers” camp. So I set up a blackworm culture—because what’s a little wriggling chaos in your home lab of questionable decisions?

And then, while I was knee-deep in googling “how to rinse worms without losing them down the drain,” I saw a post saying that all kinds of fish love live brine shrimp.

Cut to today: I’m cultivating brine shrimp eggs like a sea god. I’ve got a full-on plankton farm. It’s spirulina, it’s salinity checks, it’s tiny net scooping. It’s me vs. the microscopic world, and spoiler alert: they’re winning.

All of this because I wanted “just one tank.” My kitchen counter looks like a marine biology lab. I know words like “infusoria” and “biofilm.” I own multiple pipettes. I have a spreadsheet titled ‘Crustacean Yield Projections’.

The moral of the story: There is no such thing as “just one tank.” There is only the first tank, and then a cascading series of increasingly complex ecosystems powered by your growing need to feed tiny creatures to slightly less tiny creatures.

And honestly? No regrets.
Except maybe the snails. I’m 90% sure they’ve unionized.