Your Fishkeeping Mistakes, Accidents & Disasters?

[Tokis-Phoenix]

While there are many great fish keepers on this forum and we are all in a state of learning about the hobby, i'm sure we've all made some pretty big mistakes or had accidents & disasters in the past! What are your most memorable fishkeeping related mistakes/accidents/disasters?
I've been keeping fish for about 8 years now and i am no exception, here are some of mine ;

1. Cracked fish tank
Back when i fist started keeping fish, i started off with a little 10gallon fish tank with 3 mollies. I was living with my guy at our 1st place which consisted of a tiny bedroom, tiny bathroom and shared tiny kitchen & big living room (there were 11 of us total living in the house). When i got my tank i duly set it up on the window sill, "cycled" it, added the fish and all was suprisingly well. Until one night i woke up to hear a "drip...drip...drip" noise. I didn't think much of it and went back to sleep. Then i woke up later and heard a "drip drip drip drip!" noise and as i looked over to my fish tank it had a couple of HUGE cracks running up it and some of the glass at the top was broken and the tank was already half empty of water!

It turned out that the window sill was quite uneven and over the 2/3months the tank had been sitting on it the uneven weight distribution had caused it to crack. So i had to put the fish in a bucket and quickly buy them a new tank the next day.

2. Electrocuted by fish tank.
A couple of months later we were moving to a new flat in a new town. I left moving the fish until last and as i was unsure of the right way to move them. It was winter (old place was permanently cold) and back then i wasn't sure if i took the heater out of the tank the tank would cool down too much for the fish, so i decided to take some of the water out of the tank, then catch & bag the fish up, and then turn the heater off and finish off the tank. Well i did this except after bagging up the fish i forgot to turn off the heater and carried on taking water out of the tank.
I went of for a little break and when i came back i heard this fizzling sound and i saw it was coming from the heater which was semi exposed above the water! I my panic i just pushed the heater under the water. Silence. Heater seemed to be ok. I then put my hand into the tank and BZZZZZZZZ i got electrocuted! (very weird thing being electrocuted)

Turned out the heater had gotten so hot that when i pushed it under the water the glass surrounding the heater had cracked & electrified the tank. Was a pretty dumb mistake but i was very tired & panicky when it all happened!

3. Mistake: Bought 2 Common Plecos & a Sailfin. Yep back in the early days before i discovered fish forums i made ye olde mistake of buying tankbusting fish after pet shop staff had said they'd stay small etc.

4. Tank exploded.
When i moved to my 3rd place i had to move all my fish again and by this time i had a lot more (i think it was a 10gal, 20gal & 30gal tank). I was very careful this time about not getting electrocuted. Again, i had left moving the fish until last and when we had all finished moving everything and setting up the tanks (a couple of friends helped us move), we all sat now on our newly aquired sofa and breathed a sigh of relief.

"BOOM!"

"What was that '_' ???"
"Dunno. Sounded like it came from the room above, lets go check it out"

There was almost no furniture in the new house whatsoever and so i had set my fish tanks up on the floor in a spare room. The floor had exposed wooden floor boards and appeared to be very even. They weren't. The 30gallon tank didn't just crack, the sides more or less exploded. And the 10gal was cracking.
Extremely panicked and extremely knackered i crammed all the fish into the 10gal and in as many buckets as i could find. Miraculously i didn't loose a single fish.
I had been planning on getting a big tank soon but not the next day! But yeah, went out to a big LFS the next morning and got a shiny new Rio400.

I have to tell you, after all that i was sick of setting up fish tanks .

 

[micko]

Chucked filter media out after being told by my LFS that I had to.

Didn't do a fishless cycle as I wasn't even aware of this and wasn't suggested to do it by anyone.

Tankbuster fish, again, LFS said they'd do grand.

Was setting up a second hand tank and was cleaning it out in the shed before I done anything to it. Laid it on some bags of compost and SMASH!!!!

Over stocked.

Let the kids feed the fish (what they fed them was a whole tub of flake, a full bag of cichlid gold and a full tub of pellets)

I really do sound like I'm blaming everyone else for these things but I really do not have anyone to blame but myself, I could have searched for info on the net and didn't.

 

[fluttermoth]

I once syphoned up a weather loach and didn't notice before I tipped the water down the toilet. Took ages to catch him; he kept going round the U bend!

I've exploded a heater too, but luckily I didn't put my hand in the tank! I've had enough electric shocks off other things though; it is very strange.

 

[seizethecupcake]

1. I didn't do a fishless cycle. I had no idea what that was until after I'd already bought some fish and plopped them into my new tank.

2. Recently, I've made my water cloudy. I'm still unsure as to what happened.

 

[hackmaster]

I've not fixed my outlet off my external correctly and woke up to all the water all over the floor 80uk gallons of it...!!! All the fish on their sides sloshing around... Not one death though and it must of emptied in like 10 mins too, luckily I have the inlet a couple of inch's above the substrate

I've also been electrocuted off the light bar...

And everytime I move the decor around my Oscar sneaks up on me and bites me...

I have to keep 1 eye on him and the other on moving rocks....

 

[tenohfive]

Not entirely fish based but:

My garage is divided into two parts - the main part of the garage (where I have a couple of tanks) and a smaller end room where SWMBO keeps her rabbits. I went out to feed the rabbits barefooted one morning and realised the dividing door had been left open. As I wandered into the dark garage I felt a sharp pain on the sole of my foot, and realised I was being electrocuted. Sodding bunnies had chewed through the extension cable for the fish tanks - we came very close to having rabbit stew that night...

More recently, in order to move a tank I drained it of it's contents and whilst draining I went off to do something else and forgot about the tank. Came back in to see about an inch of water left in the tank, my Sajica and Rainbow flapping and gasping. Frantically refilled the tank from the tap, got a conveyer belt of hot and boiling water going and 3 hours later you wouldn't know that anything had happened. Very very lucky.

 

[BPB]

When I first started fish keeping, I made the mistake of cramming 5 adult Guppies, a betta, and 3 neon tetras in one of those little half gallon plastic triangle tanks with the undergravel filter. I kept them in there for about a month and couldn't figure out why the water was always cloudy and why they all kept dying. when I finally asked the wonderful people at the pet store why that was happening, they said I probably needed a little more room. I still had no knowledge of cycling or how a filter actually worked, so then with my ten gallon I dealt with months of cloudy water and fish deaths. oddly the betta lived through it all and lived 3 years.

That was years ago. My most recent mistake was to add a powerhead to my 75 gallon and the increased current killed 7 fish overnight. Yikes. Water quality is great though.

 

[Rorie]

Added 90ml of ammonia while drunk during fishless cycling....should have been 19ml - the 90ml is for dech. OOPS

Other half knocked the CO2 bottle and gassed 25 new cardinal tetras! apparently didnt hear the hissing as the tank was pumped full of CO2!

While doing a water change with hoses hooked up from aquarium to the toilet, the hose flipped out the toilet and put 6" of water on the toilet floor....guy downstairs came up and asked it there was a leak! OOPS

I have been lucky and not done anything silly while the fish were in though!

 

[scotty]

filled my new 300 litre tank with water,then realising i hadn't left enough room to put lid on!!!,empty,move and refill again

 

[Squidward]

Took all the wood out of my tank to give it a good clean.
About 15 mins later out of the corner of my I saw something moving about on the floor in between the wood. It was one of my khuli loaches. It must have been hiding and not swum away when I took the wood out..
Popped it back in the tank straight away. Next morning it was dead unfortunately.
Felt terrible about it.

 

[nigsy]

Threw an Angel fish into a water butt cleaning the tank. Good job it was summer took me nearly a week to catch him. He was loving it in there with all the fly larvae he could eat!!

Didn't seal the pump properly after cleaning the filter. Sat down in the evening and thought water levels a bit low, then noticed it coming out the back of the tank stand, as the pump merrily emptied the tank.

Put a new shoal of 20 zebra dannios in the tank, came down in the morning only 2 left - rest had been sucked up into the power head and blasted into chunks back into the water.

Same power head tried the same with a dwarf angel, but it got wedged tail first, with it's head poking out the inlet - It survived and is still alive and happy in my tank today!!

 

[BPB]

Interesting and unfortunate. I would have expected zebra danios would be more than tough enough to avoid a powerhead inlet.

 

[Baccus]

With the same tank on two diiferent occasions I have knocked the tanks fluro light into the tank while its been balancing on the edge of the tank while I was quickly doing something in the tank. Upshot....no fish deaths and I'm still here able to write this, thank goodness for electrical safety trips that are no mandortary on all QLD homes.

As a kid and not knowing any better, I set up a community tank with all the fish I liked (in other words were pretty) It was only a fairly small tank (about 2ft from memory) but I put in some comets (which actually spawned in there), an albino cory (back when they were super expensive and I only had pocket money of $5/wk), 2 dwarf gouramis, and some zebra and leapard danios , and khuli loaches and I think I eventually even added a fighter. So heaps of bad mistakes but amazingly all these fish absolutely thrived the cory got huge and loved eating earth worms, all the fish loved eating ant eggs and I never had a problem with cloudy water or sudden fish deaths. And even the filter was just one of those plastic ones that went in the corner stuffed full of carbon and filter wool with an airline feeding into it. Knowing so much more now I think by dumb luck (and lack of finaces) I had more of less done a fish in cycle only adding 1 or two fish at a time as we only went to the town that had a petshop once a month (and the first instruction from my Dad was usually "No more pets" which I always happily ignored). Plus I used to just rinse out the filter wool and reuse it over and over again until it was just to gross to consider reusing it. And I rarely cleaned all the gravel in the tank as no one else in the family was ever willing to help me man handle the tank outside, and to top it all off I had heaps of live plants in the tank as well.

 

[Little_Nemo]

I didnt do a fish-less cycle, and no research. After a week of waiting I put 3 danios into a 35ltr tank. Unfortunaly after the weekend I lost 5 fish, as I didnt realise and never knew about fishless/fish-in cycling.

Luckily thats the only mistake I've made since I decided to take up fish keeping

 

[trikidy]

using nutrafin cycle instead of nutrafin aqua plus for new water...