Victorianitas

I bought two more fish! Foolishly. Maybe. I'm counting this as a tick in the 'sensible' column, though, since despite all the cool marine fish and corals in the shop, I'm still sticking to freshwater. (But one day, one glorious day, they shall all be MINE.)

Anyway, the new fish are some variety of gourami. They were labelled as 'Sunset Honey Gourami', which I guessed meant they were a colour variant of the honey gourami (Colisa chuna), and this was good because it was honey gourami I wanted. I would tell you how long I've spent researching the best fish to put in the tank given its current inhabitants, but you would only point and mock. Let us just say it was enough for me to laugh knowingly and shake my head when the man at the fish shop told me that the dwarf gourami (Colisa lalia) would be just as sociable and easy to keep, and then draw a veil over my current fish-related geekiness.

However. The internet seems divided on precisely what species these are, with about 50% of fish sites and forums naming them a variant of Colisa chuna and the other half arguing that they're not Colisa chuna at all, with a subsection arguing to my consternation and distress that they're Colisa lalia. This is a problem - NO NO SHUT UP, hear me out, I'm serious - because some gourami species can be mean/prone to disease/mean AND prone to disease (Colisa lalia, the consensus of the internet's tropical fish communities is pointing its finger at you), and what if these end up killing everything else in the tank via direct attack or biological warfare? The worry!

They're sharing a tank with five neon tetra, collectively named the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or some of it, at least) and an apple snail who was originally called Tennyson but turned out to have a rather un-Tennyson-like personality and is now known as J. Alfred Prufrock. I have not named the new fish yet. See, if I have to convince the fish place to take back these two mean gourami, that'll be painful enough, because they are such gorgeous fish, but if I have to convince the fish place to take back Gladstone and Disraeli? I just don't think I'll have the strength.