ALLEN'S FISHCAM
Live from a 55-gallon tank in a basement den in Toledo, Ohio

This page reloads itself every 60 seconds. If it doesn't, press Reload.

Where's the fish? Start in the upper left corner. That blue and red haze is fifteen neon tetras. The two tall silver fish with the black stripes are the angelfish, Ike and Mamie, and they are usually somewhere around the big sword plant in the middle. The three spotted fellows on the gravel are the corydoras catfish, and if you see a brown shape stuck to the driftwood or the glass, that's Hoover, the pleco. Some minutes you will see all of them and some minutes you'll see nobody. That's fish for you.

See the FishCam Greatest Hits, including the frame where people write in to ask if that's a frog.

My name is Allen Cole. I'm a pharmacist here in Toledo, and I've kept tropical fish on and off since I was twelve years old and my father set up a ten-gallon tank in our kitchen. This tank is the big one: 55 gallons, four feet long, on an oak stand against the paneling in our basement den. It has been set up since the spring of 1997. My wife calls the den "the fish's room" and she isn't wrong.

The FishCam went on the air in March of 1999. I'd read about people pointing cameras at their tanks, and I had an old computer sitting in the basement doing nothing, so one Saturday I put the two together. Now my sister in Phoenix checks on the fish more often than she calls me.

• A new picture every 60 seconds, from about 7 a.m. to about 11 p.m., Eastern time, every day. I start it when I come down in the morning and shut it off when I go up to bed. Some nights I forget.
• Look at the time in the bar along the bottom. That's when the picture was taken. If it's more than a few minutes old, the old computer has locked up or the phone line has dropped. I work days at the pharmacy, so it may stay stuck until I get home. Sorry.
• If the tank is dark, the tank light is on a timer and goes off around 10:30 at night, and the den is dark too. The fish are asleep. Yes, fish sleep. The tetras lose some of their color at night, which surprises people.
• If it's all black, somebody turned off the lamp and the tank light both, or the camera got bumped. Probably me, with the vacuum.

Also in the tank: tan gravel, one live Amazon sword plant (the big one in the middle), a few plastic plants I'm not proud of, a piece of driftwood, a bubble wand across the back and a little ceramic castle my daughter picked out when she was nine. She's in college now. The castle stays.

I count pills for a living, so of course I test the water. Last Saturday's numbers:

A quarter of the water gets changed every other Saturday morning. Yes, I know about the green tinge and the algae on the glass. The camera sees everything. It's on the list.

For the people who write and ask:

• A Connectix Color QuickCam, sitting on the bookshelf about six feet from the tank, level with it.
• It's plugged into the printer port of a 486 that my brother-in-law gave me when he bought his new Pentium. It runs Windows 95 and a shareware program called Webcam32, and that is all it does.
• Every 60 seconds Webcam32 grabs a picture, stamps the time on it and sends it up to this page by FTP.
• The 486 stays dialed in all day on our second phone line, the one we put in when our daughter was in high school. It finally has a use again.

The camera doesn't see much of the room, just the tank and a strip of paneling. If you notice a gray sleeve coming down from the top of the picture around 8 in the morning, that's breakfast.

You are fish watcher number

since March 1999

Questions about the tank, the camera or your own fish: [email protected]

Last updated September 26, 1999