My Boss's Obsession

My boss at my pub job, recently acquired a new hobby of tropical fish. He was given a tank for his 50th birthday (bought by all of us, how nice of us,) and started building it right after.

He had advices given from experts, and spent all his spare time and considerable amount of dough on buying fish and all the accessories and such.


This is a snapshot of his tank about 2 months in. You can tell how much staff/fish/effort he's put in in a very short period;

Just for the reference here is my tank, 18 months in;

Mine is subtle, and, well, economical. The sand is cheap pond gravel, and all the plants are from IKEA. Submerged objects are all second hand.

Anyway, so he put more fish each week, and after about 6 weeks I started to tell him that he has too many in there. The rule of fish keeping is, "take your time". I took 6 months before I decided to increase the number of fish to double, and took me further 6 months to do so.

He said to me that he checks water daily and all is well. He changes water every 3 days, and he even use store bought pure water to do so. (OMG, I didn't even know there was such a thing!) Ohh, ok then, I guess I only do water change once a month, so I shan't say no more.

But then he started having problems, though he didn't really lost his fish he always had some problem to report every time I went to work. He reckons the gourami is dying, and then he thinks that Guppy babies are polluting water, then he tells me that plec he bought is not eating enough.

His world now is full of fish problems, and he tells me all with such a joy, not because he enjoys fish's suffering but because he loves running around for his beloved fish, and has to tell me of this.

But, the thing is, he just has such a weird knowledge base on fish keeping, which never fails to stun me. I mean, he once said,
"Fish are gasping for air today, you think I have too much water in my tank?"

And he always buys fish (well his son-in-law gets them for him) and just drops it straight to tank, immediately. Not heard of acclimation?? And he never checks water temperature when changing water. He gets a tank of pure water from store and dumps it in his tank.

And how come he hasn't killed no more than 2 fish so far?

I am just not getting my head around this at all.

We are snowed in today.
Figarion loved running around on
this bloody thing!!