Water Features 31

But I should not forget the original fish on the balcony, the small fish I put in the little tank, and then the angels in the big one, together with some round white fish. The angels bred almost at once, so only the parents were left with the little ones, dozens of them it seems.

Sadly those I put in other tanks did not survive, but there are still over twenty I think in the big tank. And though the mother died within a month of the babies emerging, the father survived, and for months I was able to identify him when they all swarmed round the food I dropped in. Recently though his children have got so big that I am not sure as to which he is, though I think he can be seen in the first picture here.

Though the tank has a big glass frontage, the angels lurked at the back, so for months I only saw them well when I fed them and they came up in clouds to grab what they could. But a month back when Kavi cleaned the other tanks he cleaned up the front of this, and perhaps because of this they now appear there in the morning when I go up with their food, as though demanding that I feed them first. The second picture shows them clustered at the front, the white ones dominating though you can see a couple of the black ones at the back. The orange that decorates the white ones is not so prominent when one sees them, but for some reason it shows up well in pictures.

For almost the whole of their first year of existence it seemed that all the angels in this pond survived, which made me feel worse about the fate of those I had moved. But then in September I found one floating at the top of the pond, just as their mother had been floating eleven months earlier. And then the next month there were two dead on the same day, one floating on top, and another an odd shape in the greenery below, which turned out to be another dead angel. I wondered then whether there had been others dying over the year, lost in the depths of the pond, but there has never been a smell, so I trust this was not the case.

After I show these fish, the latter being buried under the roses, I show the other survivor of the original four angels I brought to the balcony. I had removed the second pair when the mother and father treated them as hostile, way back in October, and put them in the little pond, where the pondweed affected them badly and one of them died. But the other as I have described survived, and though once he gave me a scare he soon revived, and now is almost always near the top when I go up in the morning.

And with him are the six tetra who have survived for over a year now. I had put in eight, but two died almost straight away. But the others remain, and I usually see at least four of a morning, and occasionally all six, though not all are here with their friendly angel in the next two pictures, taken in August and then in early November.

But sadly I no longer see the platies which were the first fish there. One of the six originally put in died soon, but the other five survived for nearly a year, and then there were just four visible. They used to be on top or came up soon enough for food, but for a months they have scarcely been visible. And yet there is at least one still there, for about once every two weeks, at least till last month, he would suddenly come up to eat, and then vanish again into the depths.