Jared Andrews

I have been an on-and-off fish tank guy since high school. I was given a betta fish as a gift which I had for many years. In college I had a fish tank with a bunch of neon fish and some larger shrimp. Then I had a decade long fish tank drought upon moving to Boston and then traveling. Now settled in Worcester, tanks were a possibility again. I had been considering it for quite a while but not pulling the trigger. Then one day I found out my 94 year old Grandpa was going to visit family in the south for a month. He needed someone to watch his fish and I said "of course".

When I was younger my Grandparents lived out in the woods. Their house was positioned up the hill from a swamp and then a river. Across the street was a pond that the river connected to. In the back yard and in the swamp Grandpa had built a lot of stuff, like decorative outhouses for storage and an artificial pond. The artificial pond had many natural inhabitants but in the spring or summer my Grandpa would move 3 huge fish from inside tanks to the pond. Inside he usually had a few tanks going with different types of fish.

During the period I was watching his fish, he only had one tank and it was full of "guppies" and snails. In fact there was a snail population explosion happening. I had never had snails before and I found watching them to be surprisingly cool. When my Grandpa returned from the south I asked if I could have some snails and he said "of course".

I bought a 6 gallon cube tank and put the snails in there. I decided instead of getting fish I was going to start adding plants first. I had never grown live plants in an aquarium before but I had been seeing a lot of it on instagram and reddit and getting into the idea. I got really into the cube tank and have learned a lot from setting it up. I have had it for about 2 years now.

While I was getting into the planted tanks with my snail friends. My Grandpa continued keeping things going with his. He got the snail population under control, mostly by feeding them to birds. But then he had a "guppie" explosion to deal with. I keep putting guppies in quotes because that's what he told me they were. I'm not totally certain tho, I feel like some of them look a lot like mollies. It's possible there are two different type of fish. He ended out splitting the fish into two tanks and trying to get the gender ratio more correct. I think this was somewhat effective.

My Grandpa passed away in October 2023. He was a cool guy with a lot of fascinating skills and hobbies. He was a great guitar player and played in a lot of different bands when he was young, going all over the country. No recordings exist from that time but we did get him into the studio when he turned 80. You can listen to those tracks here.