I just had to share my relief at seeing my fourth clown loach swimming happily around the tank after yesterdays er accident........
........So I decided to give my tank a tidy up and so took everything out first to rearrange it. I took out one of the large ornaments (that I did not realise were hollow all the way through). I took it into the kitchen and was going to rinse it out. So I gave it a shake first and a clown loack fell out ahhhhhh!
I stood there for a few second jumping up and down in a panic, opps! And then I scooped him up and popped him back in the tank. He swam off ok, but then I could only count three loaches until a few minutes ago, phew!
i've had similar scares. I had a nasty incident in where my betta ended up on the kitchen counter writhing around. After swearing and screaming I managed to shovel him up with the net and he was okay. Thank God for fast reflexes, huh?
When I first got my two clowns they disappeared on me. I tore the tank apart removing everything including a large piece of driftwood. I never found them and wondered what happened. A couple days later they were back....I wondered where they could have been......eventually they grew too large to totally hide in a crack that was in the back of the driftwood....their tails began to stick out
Now they are too big to get in at all so I see them all the time playing around. But my point is....that driftwood was taken out of the tank and set down on a counter for I don't know how long....out of the water....and they were just fine....wierd little creatures they are.
I made a similar mistake a couple weeks ago, too. When I was transferring everything from my 15 gallon tank into the new 38 gallon tank, I was putting the corys into the new tank from the bucket. One of them managed to, somehow, stick in the bucket, and I didn't notice until a couple seconds later, when he was still in there with no water left! I was a little worried, but it really wasn't very long, so I assumed he would be alright. He's fine, now.
I've heard of a clown or two that managed to hop up onto the ledge formed by the bottom of the tank's cover. The keeper found it around a half-hour later (I don't know how he knew when it got up there) and the fish survived just fine!
lucky he was ok. a week or so ago one of my cichlids jumped out and got a bunch of dog'cat hair cought in his gills and couldnt breathe. i had to pull all of the hair out of him
)
Probably wasn't funny at the time, but a nice happy ending.
