You’ll be pleased to find out that I just purchased twenty ghost shrimp on EBay. I thought the loach had eaten the previous herd of ten, but I was delighted to discover there were survivors. So now I’m getting a bunch more, figuring the loach will take his share but the rest will be around to partake in the great fish dying due anytime now, as the vast herd of platys reaches their life expectancy and bloops their last bloop. Some fish corpses float, some sink. The floaters I scoop up with the net and toss into the planter out front. No point in wasting good fertilizer. The sinkers are a pain in the ass. So the shrimp get those. They can reduce a fish carcass to nothing in a matter of days. I’d rather not think about it. And the platys own culinary kinks guarantee the population will not recover, because a platy’s favorite dish is fresh born platy. None of the babies survive the feasts, and as there is no longer a dense jungle of floating vegetation for the fry to hide in—they ate that too, for roughage I guess—the babies are easy pickings. You can see the adults gathering together and leisurely devouring platy DNA. It’s fucked up. But it did neatly stop the aquarium’s population explosion, and there was one baby, as in a single fish, that has made it to adulthood in the past year. They’re efficient, you gotta give them that. So efficient they’re eating themselves into extinction in our tank. Platys live three to four years, typically, but invariably fish in our tank live to the outer edge of their life expectancy, so I won’t be surprised to see many of them last for five. But eventually the lot of them, nearly all of which born in a single year, will go to fish heaven, leaving all sorts of niches for us to fill with species that don’t fuck so goddamn much. Some fish have no shame at all.