For Christmas, Santa brought Captain Jelly Belly an aquarium and three orange guppies. Since then, and I have been totally paranoid about keeping the fish alive, and every day there’s a long discussion about how the tank is doing, how the fish are doing, have you checked the fish today, do you think they need more food, less food, different food, and do you think those bigger two are ostracizing the smaller one? It’s all very tense.

A few weeks ago the tank broke out in a massive infestation of brown algae. Apparently this is not uncommon for new tanks but we completely freaked out. We called our fish source, my brother-in-law, and he offered lots of helpful suggestions, including getting a new algae-eating fish. We decided to go for it (although we’re still not sure about the social groupings in the tank and how a new fish might affect the gang wars in there). When I went to the fish store, though, they told me that keeping an algae-eating catfish around is pretty hard work, and instead, I should get a shrimp.

So we brought home Jacques, who was very very ugly and creepy, but set to work on the algae right away. We named him Jacques after the shrimp in the movie Finding Nemo (think, “He is clean!” spoken in a French accent). I kind of liked to watch the little guy — he was a super fast swimmer and when he clung to the side to pick off the algae, it was pretty cool.

I’ve been meaning to make a post about Jacques for a few days now, because of this strange ability he has to disappear for days at a time, then suddenly reappear like he’s been on a shrimp vacation in the Hamptons and nothing is out of the ordinary. Seriously, there have been multiple times when we have searched everywhere in the tank for him — under rocks, behind the filter, under the gravel even — and he eludes us. The first time this happened we were convinced he’d gotten out of the tank somehow and was gone for good, but after 24 hours he magically reappeared, giving us a look like, “What? A dude needs to get away from time to time.” Since then he’s vanished several more times, sometimes for more than a day, but he always comes back.

This morning, sadly, I found Jacques easily in the tank — he passed away in the night. I’m surprised how sad I feel about it. He was a cool little guy. I only hope he’s gone to the shrimp Hamptons in the sky.