Lepisosteidae

I haven’t been updating lately, largely because this is a for-college blog and short of buying insane amounts of file folders and pillow cases, I haven’t been doing much in the way of college. However, inspired by Tom over at Atomic Nerds, I figured I’d share a mysterious animal story of my own.

A couple years ago, I was living in an apartment, and due to limited space, a real fish tank wasn’t exactly an option, so I was keeping bettas. We had quite a few of them, mostly set up in critter cages (which are square plastic tanks with plastic lids) and for the most part, they were pretty happy fish.

One day, though, one of the bettas disappeared. There had been a lid on his tank, but suddenly I came home and there was no betta. He wasn’t in one of the other tanks, he wasn’t caught in the filter, he wasn’t anywhere on the floor or behind the desk the tanks were on. The dogs hadn’t been uncrated, so there was no chance that he’d leaped out and fallen victim to their snacking tendencies. He was just gone. I reached the conclusion that he’d been the subject of some sort of betta alien abduction and got a replacement.

About six months later, we were moving, and I was going through a bunch of boxes, including an enormous tupperware thing full of office supplies that had been sitting next to the desk for a year or so. Kind of absently, I pried open a stapler to check if it needed refilling, and was met with the knowledge of what had happened to my fish. There was a tiny mummified betta inside of the stapler.

Somehow, he had jumped out of his tank – which had a lid on – and gotten into a sealed tupperware bin, further managing to wedge himself into a stapler. I’m never actually going to know how or why he did it, but I think the rules of darwinism and natural selection apply: being the fish equivalent of Houdini is, sadly, not a very useful trait for a betta.