Will It Grow Back?

[LaVidaBoring]

Geez, I'm a horrible fish mommy. I hurt my betta this morning.

Here's the whole sad story...

Yesterday, I got a nice piece of driftwood with anubias nana rooted on it in the mail that I had bought from a guy on eBay, along with a Lace Java Fern to attach to the piece of driftwood I already have. Well, the anubias driftwood chunk was too big & heavy for my 5.5 gall tank and also quite dirty, with a lot of algae growing on it. So I rinsed it off, sawed about 1/3 of just the driftwood part off (kept the plant, obviously), and put it in my tank.

Trouble is, that dumped lots of flecks of driftwood and driftwood sawdust into the water. I rinsed the driftwood off after I did the cutting, but obviously that wasn't enough. The dirt and driftwood had mostly settled on the bottom overnight, but the tank water was still a tad cloudy when I got up early this morning. And I must have missed an algae spot, because I saw a ball of green fuzz on my tank bottom. Worst of all, I saw a tiny pond snail climbing up the side of my tank, and I *hate* pond snails. They absolutely took over the 10 gall tank I had as a teen and it took forever to get rid of them. The Lacy Java Fern that I also got in the mail yesterday also had some soil substrate sticking to its roots, so maybe that's where the snail was hiding.

Sooooo, this morning I did about a 1/2 water change to remove all of the detritus, cloudy water, and snails with my gravel vac. I feel so stupid now, but I left the fish and plants (both of which are attached to driftwood chunks) in the tank when I did this. I used to vacuum the gravel in my 10gal/40L tank I had as a teenager, and I don't remember removing the fish to do that, but then that tank was also larger.

So I ended up vacuuming perhaps a little too briskly to get all of the crud out of the tank, and I not only broke one of my anubias's leaves but worst of all....I tore my betta's tail. I feel so horrible. He has about a 1 cm long by 1mm wide sliver of tail fin missing. There was one terrible moment when I accidentally trapped him up against one of the driftwood pieces while I was using the gravel vac and he was swimming violently to get away from the gravel vac, so that's when it must have happened. Next time I'll remove both fish and driftwood chunks before I vacuum the gravel.

So, will my fish's tail grow back to its former beauty? How long will it take to heal? Is there anything special I should do in the meantime to help him heal? I feel so awful now.

PS: The new driftwood piece really affected my tank pH, bringing it down by about .4 units. Is that just because I exposed new surfaces of it by sawing it? Will it stop affecting the pH so dramatically once all of the newly exposed tannins leach out? I'm not worried about it bringing down the pH as much as just the dramatic overnight change it caused.

 

[BethK]

He will heal, don't worry. Just ensure his water is clean on a daily basis, you can add some stress coat in, just to give him a helping hand.

 

[JoshuaA]

You can always taake the driftwood out and put it in a bucket of water over night/week to see how much it changes your pH. After all the driftwood could help you eliminate the need of pH down.

Don't worry about the fin it should grow back and like Beth said if you have anything with stress coat give him a nice dose of that as if you were treating the water. Just minimise the stress which is hard when you're trying to remove the tannin full water and debris.

I've got my driftwood in a cycling tank, It needs a good water change every 4 or so days because of dark the water gets. Personally i quite like it, it gives the tank a gold glow with my tropical lamp on it. However with regards to the pH again if you feel its dropping too fast you can always use your tap water as it is high after all.