He's a natural!

There's something fishy about Eli and it's honestly not all my doing. He just loves getting into our local creek to do a spot of fishing and he is always super excited whenever he catches something, whether it be a water boatman, a backswimmer, a waterstrider, a damselfly or dragonfly nymph, or even a caddis fly larvae. But what really excites him, more than all of the wonderful types of bugs he can capture, is when he is able to catch a fish in his net. 

Now it must be said that Eli's an experienced hand at catching the non-native guppies that reside in our creek, but on our most recent fishing trip he managed to catch a couple of bigger and much better specimens. First, he went deeper than ever before, so that he was chest deep in the water and away he went sweeping his net through the water near the overhanging fern tree...and lo and behold, he had netted a purple spotted gudgeon. He was over the moon (since we were getting sick of collecting guppies!) as he'd never caught a gudgeon before.

Not content with one gudgeon, he set back on the task of catching something else, something new...and that's when it happened. After a seemingly innocuous sweep of his net, he proudly proclaimed that he thought that he'd caught an eel! I didn't scoff at the suggestion (there are eels in our creek), but I was a bit suspicious, but then there it was swimming around in our bucket. Sure, it was tiny, but there's no mistaking it. Eli was super excited and wanted to keep the eel in one of our aquaria, but I didn't think that plan would gel so well with our gudgeon breeding program (see earlier post) so I convinced him that we shouldn't keep it. The deal was brokered that we would add his newly collected gudgeon to our ever-growing population and Eli named him 'Crazy'. It took a few days, but Crazy has now really gotten comfortable in the tank and is even starting to get brighter colours courtesy of the clear water and good food. Now Eli is looking forward to Crazy breeding (we are pretty sure she is a female) to continue the successes we've been having of late...I wonder where this is going to end...