"It's not the happy little world that you might think."

Yes, it's true. Keeping an aquarium is not for the faint-hearted. My friend and I were discussing his new setup and he said, "Oh, I never told you what happened to the other shrimp." Uh-oh, I thought. It turns out that the last batch of poor little red shrimp were eaten alive by the bigger shrimp that were already in his aquarium. Apparently, it was some kind of crustacean turf battle. Of course, earlier in the year the big shrimp population had been decimated by an especially vicious puffer we liked to call "Fang." Fang got his name after he chipped one of his two front teeth on a block of frozen bloodworms. Despite his small size (1.5 inches on a good day), he sported quite the attitude. Fang was exiled to a local fish store after his murderous rampage. Unfortunately, the image of Fang plucking the legs off one of his victims still lingers in my memory.

I have my own stories of death and destruction, most notably the Chrismas Day Massacre of 2003. (Or perhaps it was 2002.) In any case, that is a tale for another day.