Something fishy is going on in my family. And it involves, for approximately the hundredth time, a dead fish.

The latest fine finny friend to go belly-up was Igor, a blue boy betta who belonged to two of my granddaughters, which made him, I guess, my grandfish.

But not to worry: There’s a replacement Igor swimming in the tiny bowl on the kitchen counter in the house where the girls (and their parents) reside.

And the girls (but not their parents) are none the wiser.

That’s because my younger daughter, the girls’ mommy, told me to check on Igor when my wife, Sue, and I brought our granddaughters back home after a sleepover at our house.

“Igor is on his last legs,” my daughter said in a phone call.

“You mean his last fins,” I replied, correcting her.

“Whatever,” my daughter said. “If Igor is dead, dump him in the toilet and replace him with the fish that’s in the laundry room. Make sure the girls don’t find out.”

Sure enough, Igor had breathed (or gulped) his last, so I flushed him to kingdom come and replaced him with the blue boy betta that swam jauntily in a clear plastic container from the pet store.

The girls, as they had so many times before, never knew the difference.

According to my daughter, the present Igor is number eight or nine or maybe even 10. She’s lost count.

Not long ago, my daughter saw one of the previous Igors lying motionless at the bottom of his bowl. She removed him and told the girls he had to go to the hospital for surgery, which gave her time to get a replacement fish. It’s the one I found resting lifelessly on the colorful pebbles in his watery domain.

Duping young children into believing that their fish will live forever, when in reality most of them last about as long as the Super Bowl halftime show, began when my daughter and her older sister were little.

Of the dozens of goldfish that resided in our humble home during my daughters’ early years, the most beloved — and tragic — was Curly.

I kept Curly alive for weeks after the sudden deaths of his bowl mates, Moe and Larry, who had died within minutes of each other, probably in a suicide pact.

I fed Curly daily, changed his water religiously and greeted him every morning with a cheery “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!”

One evening, I opened the door of a kitchen cabinet, directly above Curly’s bowl on the counter, only to see a bottle of vitamins fall out, in slow motion, and conk the little fish on the head.

By the next morning, Curly was deader than vaudeville.

“You killed our fish!” the girls wailed.

I tried to lessen their pain with words of comfort: “They were Mommy’s vitamins.”

Fast forward a generation to our younger daughter’s daughters, who talked their mother into getting the original Igor.

They also talked me and Sue into getting Camilla, a pink girl betta who would be Igor’s cousin. She lived on the liquor cabinet in the dining room in what I dubbed the Camilla Parker Bowl.

Forty-eight hours later, Camilla needed a royal flush. My granddaughters were on their way over, so I hightailed it to the pet store and got another Camilla, a lookalike in every way except he was a boy. It gave new meaning to the term gender-fluid.

The girls never knew the difference.

We have since had a half-dozen Camillas, all pink males who just like to feel pretty. The current one is about a year old and is starting to go gray around the gills.

The current Igor is young and healthy and lives in a little bowl on a counter in my granddaughters’ kitchen. So far, things are going swimmingly. I just hope he doesn’t get conked on the head by a bottle of vitamins.

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