I'll have the sushi, please

Developer Frank Battle was my red male Japanese betta fish.

I've kept bettas off an on for several years, and at one point had 23 bettas at one time. If you're not familiar with them, bettas are interesting because they'll live peacefully with other fish, but they don't much care for each other. Put two males in the same tank or bowl, and they will fight to the death of one or both of them. That in itself is amazing, because bettas have very small mouths, and as fish, they don't have arms or legs or anything else with which to fight. But the males have long, flowing fins — beautiful fish, really — so they fight by clamping down on those fins with those powerful jaws and ripping and tearing fins until somebody dies. A male betta will do the same thing to a female betta, except for those brief interludes necessary to carry on the species. But you can put as many females together as you want, and they'll all live in harmony. Must be a testosterone thing.

Frank was named after Frank Battle, a real estate developer who builds Wal-Mart SuperCenters for a living. I got Frank about the time Wal-Mart was negotiating with our city officials to build a second SuperCenter here in Edmond. Another interesting factoid about bettas is that they can live in very small amounts of water. In their native environment, many of them live in small puddles, I'm told. I've heard stories that they're shipped from Japan to America in a plastic bag with two or three tablespoons of water in the bag. That's not a lot of water for a two-week trip inside a carboard box, but the fish don't seem to care. Most betta bowls you buy only hold eight to 16 ounces of water, and that's enough to make the betta very happy, they say.

But Frank was special, because when I bought him, I put him in a 2 1/2 gallon tank, which to a fish is kinda like living at Micheal Jackson's place to a kid. He was named after Battle because his tank was to him the size of a Wal-Mart SuperCenter.

Eventually Frank was moved into even better digs — a five-gallon hex tank that I had some goldfish and other critters in. Among the other critters were two African dwarf frogs.

One of those dwarf frogs was an albino named Mayor Saundra Naifeh. I hope the frog was a girl, but I don't know. Naifeh is our mayor here in Edmond, and she's a blonde, like the albino frog. But the name is fitting for other reasons, including the fact that the mayor authorized the city to use public and private funds to buy a sculpture of a toad wearing a golden crown, which is prominently displayed outside our city hall, for some reason. I bet you think I'm making all this up. The mayor thinks the toad is art. Most of the rest of us think the toad makes us look like Six Flags over Edmond.

In reality, Saundra the albino frog was probably a boy, or at least he/she/it ate like a boy. The little girl at the pet store recommended I feed the two dwarf frogs shrimp pellets, which are specifically designed to sink to the bottom for bottom-feeders in your tank. Higher in protein than flake food designed for the fish, she said.

The average shrimp pellet is much too big for a dwarf frog to swallow, and they don't have teeth, so they can't exactly chew those up, either. So I usually have to break the pellets in two so the frogs can eat them. The other frog never took to the pellets, and is still alive and well, but the same size as he was a year ago. But albino Saundra wasted no time the first time I dropped pellets into the tank. She was so small at the time — and the pellets so large in comparison — that you could actually follow the pellet's progress through the digestive tract because of the bulge it created. I'm sure that first pellet had to hurt. But that didn't stop her from eating them whenever they were offered.

But the protien in the pellet made her grow. And grow. And grow. Grow to the point that she was a good 2 1/2 times the size of the other dwarf frog.

Well, as nature would have it, Frank died yesterday. Don't think he was sick, I think it was just his time. He'd lived a good long life in the Taj Mahal of betta worlds. I could tell Frank was dying when I got home from work yesterday. He had that "dying fish" look, which is not only noticeable by humans, but by other fish as well. It's not unusual in a community fish tank for other fish to help the process of dying along a bit when one of their mates is in that process. Nothing like kicking your friends when they're down.

When I came home from supper, I looked for Frank, to see if it was time to fish him out and take him to the big toilet bowl in the sky. When I found Frank after dinner, Saundra was trying to have him for dinner. Forget the shrimp pellets. She was having sushi. Frog had about the first one-third of Frank in her mouth and down her throat. Her poor little mouth was stretched as wide as it could go. I'm not exactly sure how the frog planned to eat this fish, since the betta was at least as long as the frog, and there would be no tearing Frank up into little bite-sized pieces. I didn't think it was gonna be possible, but then I don't think it's possible for a snake to eat a rabbit, either. Happens all the time, though.

By bedtime last night, Saundra still had Frank in her mouth, and didn't seem to be making much progress. But I figured she'd be much farther along by morning.

When I checked this morning before work, Saundra — like Frank — was dead, Frank still firmly entrenched in her mouth, with only his back half outside the frog's mouth. Not sure what happened, but I guess the size of the fish affected the frog's ability to breathe or something, and the frog was either unwilling or unable to spit the betta out.

I'm sure there's a lesson here, but I have no clue what it is. Even though the frog learned a valuable yet fatal lesson about eating sushi, I have to admire the little critter. She saw what she wanted and went for it, undaunted by the enormity of the task at hand.

Thanks for stopping by.