Caught In The Whirlwind
The Great Fish Escape
Well, I almost lost another Zebra Danio this morning. Well…more accurately last night.
Last night I was working on the weekly (well, at that point weekly + 1 day) aquarium cleaning. Changing out the water, sucking up the crap in the gravel, that kinda stuff. It had been about a month since I last cleaned out the filter so I figured I should probably do that. My filter has a little basket thing that contains all of the sponges and gravely stuff that does it's cleaning magic. So I took that out while leaving the filter still running since it's a pain in the butt to unplug it all the time. So I pulled the basket out, cleaned out the stuff and put it back in…no problem, filter still works, all that stuff. I re-fill the tank, and then I went to bed.
Cut to this morning…I went to feed the fish and I noticed that I seem to only have two Zebra Danio's left instead of the three I was expecting. After looking around the tank for a bit, I decided to check the filter. I opened it up and started to pull the basket out. When it was about halfway out of the filter I see a danio make a flying leap out of the back of the filter and behind the tank. I watched horrified for a moment as it started flopping around and then I frantically tried to find something to pick it up with since it wasn't in an easy to reach location.
My plan was to grab a paper plate and try to get the fish to flop onto that so I could deposit it back into the tank. By the time I grabbed a plate though, the fish had already flopped off of my counter and onto the floor near my computer desk. I dove over there, and tried to get it to jump onto the plate but it wasn't cooperating. I ended up making a grab for it's back fin, pinched it between two fingers and quickly snapped it up and dropped it back into the tank.
He seems to be doing fine at the moment…but I'll have to see if the stress freaked him out too much or something. As near as I can tell, he got sucked up into the filter while I was cleaning it. Oops.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Jason on August 23, 2007 at 1:18 pm, and is filed under Uncategorized. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 4 years ago
gosh that has happened here with my black moor.
about 4 years ago
Note to self…check filter before putting basket back in…He was a little disoriented after putting him in, but he went right for the food when I put that in about 15 minutes later. I'm sorta new to this fishkeeping stuff, so this is my first "escape" attempt.
about 4 years ago
That is hilarous
about 4 years ago
I'm fairly new to having fish too – only been a couple of months. luckily they seem to be pretty resiliant – living here they have to be!