Your Worst Fish Story.

[Tolak]

A couple of years back, while on vacation with the wife, we call home to see how the kids (20 & 22 y.o.) are doing. Everything is great, except the 55 seems to be leaking. This was one of my first tanks, I got it from my Dad when he moved. I told them to just keep an eye on it, if it gets more than a few inches low, add a bit of water.

We get home, it's 6 inches low, the heater half way melted one of the plastic clips. Ends up the filter had pushed up the media & was trickling water down the back. Fix the filter, fill the tank, & mop the floor. Glad it's in the basement.

It would be nice if it ended there, but a couple of weeks later, before work, i notice the water level isn't quite level. The water that had leaked soaked the one leg of the cheap pressed wood stand. The stand was melting! Great. After work I picked up a metal stand, & a 20 long to put the fish in during the switch. By this time the tank was pitched about 1" lower on the right side. Stayed up until 2 am pulling everything apart & switching stands. The next day at work was rough!

Tolak

 

[Matty]

The day after I got my bala sharks, I decided to take off the filter inlet cover on my eheim to make it more efficient. The next day, one of my tetras were missing, but the guy in the LFS said that my sharks might be intimidating them, so it was probably hiding. The next day, another one of my tetras were missing, so I decided that the sharks must be eating them and I decided to check the filter for their skeletons. It turns out that the filter sucked them up while they were sleeping! Both were alive in the bottom of the filter, but one of the tetras was really really battered and I didnt think that he would make it, but he did and he's fine now. I call him lucky and yes, i've kicked myself many times for making that rookie mistake.

 

[Acrobit]

I had a bronze cory that jumped out of the tank and was inside my heater. Luckily, I got him out and he lived. He passed on a few months later, though.

 

[Synirr]

While switching my 10 gallon from gravel substrate to sand, I had all my fish in various cooking bowls because I only have one bucket which was being used for emptying and refilling the tank. All the bowls were sitting on the floor next to the tank. The bottom feeders, two khuli loaches and a really old cory which I swear will never die, were in a bowl by themselves. I had just picked up an extremely heavy bucket of tank water that I was about to carry off to the sink when my dad's golden retriever marched into my room, firmly colliding with my leg and causing me to stumble sideways... my foot landing on the very edge of the bottom-feeders' bowl, causing it to tip over and spill its contents EVERYWHERE. I looked down to find drenched carpet and three fishies flopping around on the floor. I quickly scooped them up and everyone survived, but the carpet took 24 hours to dry completely

 

[transposia]

We were given a koi that lived in our heated tank with other fish for a while. Then when he started to be too big, He got his own tank with a little goldfish. We had him from the time he was about 2-3 inches. Well, in his new tank we took the heat off and began to prepare him for pond life.
We built him a pond, also. Finally it was time to transition him. We put him in the pond and sat around for the longest time watching him. Well, we went in for dinner and instinct told me to go check on him. he was out of the water and in the dirt. "Oye" didn't make it. I've never been so angry in my life. He was gorgeous and almost 12-13" long!

R.I.P

 

[redtailblackshark]

I am still really sad and almost cry about this sometimes:

Last year I had 5 neon tetras, 3 leopard danios, and a red-tail black shark. I wanted a clown loach really badly, so I decided to go to the fish store and buy one, when I got there, there were tiger barbs, and clown loaches in the same tank. The lady at the fish store, said the fish she gave me was a clown loach, so I thought it was also (I was a n00b at fish at the time.) When I put it in the tank, everything looked fine so I went to bed. When I got up, all the fish were hiding in one big group in the corner, and they almost all had their fins nipped, except the rtbs. So I thought they got sick. The next day the clown loach (or thats what I thought it was) was dead, and I finally realized it was a tiger barb, and it nipped all the fishes fins, luckily, they all made a full recovery. But I still fell really sorry for the little tiger barb...

 

[Corruptor]

The day after I got my bala sharks, I decided to take off the filter inlet cover on my eheim to make it more efficient. The next day, one of my tetras were missing, but the guy in the LFS said that my sharks might be intimidating them, so it was probably hiding. The next day, another one of my tetras were missing, so I decided that the sharks must be eating them and I decided to check the filter for their skeletons. It turns out that the filter sucked them up while they were sleeping! Both were alive in the bottom of the filter, but one of the tetras was really really battered and I didnt think that he would make it, but he did and he's fine now. I call him lucky and yes, i've kicked myself many times for making that rookie mistake.

About a week after I put in my Eheim, I noticed my ph getting low so I added a bit of buffer, planning to add a little bit each day for the next 2 weeks or so. More buffer the next day. 3rd day, all 7 of my neons were missing. I assumed I had changed the ph too much at once and killed them overnight, with the loach and gourami disposing of the evidence. So I discontinued the buffer additions, and kicked myself for 2 days. While looking in the stand cabinet, I spotted 2 heads looking at me from the Eheim cannister! I spent 3 hours getting them out and putting everything back the way it needed to be, this time with an intake strainer / filter. I wound up losing 3 of the neons, but the other 4 have returned to full health.

As a side note, I also found an itty bitty platy fry when I opened the filter (still alive), leading me to the discovery of at least 6 more hiding out under the driftwood in the tank!

 

[grayshark]

I have read afew stroys on page one But I dont have time to read them all.

 

[squirrelrabbits]

I had a beautiful, delicate little horsefaced loach who jumped out the bag as I was switching him over to the bowl in the sink and yep: he went right down the drain. Much running and shouting ensued ("Get me some water! No--TANK WATER!... Where are the pliers? ... How do you get this thing off?" and so on).

After much commotion (and perhaps five minutes of the loach being not just out of the water but inside a dirty, potentially toxic drain pipe), I managed to get the little pipe under the sink loose and found the loach was wedged in the upper pipe. With no time to lose, I turned on the water and flushed him into a waiting bucket of tankwater (unfortunately, I didn't have the sense to flush him with tankwater... ).

Upon being placed in a tank, he went under the substrate and did not reappear for about a week. I observed a slight ammonia spike in the tank and sadly began to look for his body in the sand but....

....lo and behold, after one week he surfaced and he is one of my best loaches ever.

So that is my best AND my worst story, all wrapped in one.

 

[ferrikins]

Mine's gotta be, when I was moving my ADF, she jumped out of the net she was being transported in, (from tank to jug to take upstrairs, jug to tank.)

She manage to jump out of the net and landed in my hand bag, that was next to the tank, I managed to get her back out in my hand.

Poor little think she was being moved as she already been attacked and blinded by my newt.

She fine now and lifes with 2 boy frogs.

 

[FalconStorm]

I think my worst story is pretty depressing. Very recently, I had a dojo loach in a tank with a decoration that looked like a Chinese pagoda. It had very small openings at the bottom for "doors", maybe a half inch by quarter inch in size. Well, the loach was in there for over a month before I look over one day to find him part way through one of the openings. At first, I think he's just being curious, but on closer inspection, I discover he has gotten his head and front fins through the opening, but the rest of him won't fit.

Panicked, I pull him out and put him in a bowl of tank water, with the decoration. I spend about fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to save him. The decoration won't be broken and to push him back out, I would have to crush his eyes and skull and break off his front fins. In the end, I couldn't figure out a way to get him out without causing him a lot of pain, so I had to put him to sleep with some clove oil. I tried pushing him out to see if the damage it would cause might be minimal, but it wasn't so I had to put him out of his misery. I will never have another ornament in my tank with an opening so small unless it is covered over with silicone.

 

[akitty6552]

One time, when i was doing a water change, I moved on of the rocks in my tank to stir up some of the gravel around it. Little did I know my dwarf gourami Betsy (this is when I first started with fish and named them lol), got wedged in between the glass of my tank and the rock. The next day I noticed she was swimming really oddly. Then I noticed that she was kind of bent in the shape of an "s". I must have smashed her enough that it bent her out of shape. Anyway, she just swam around in circles for a few days when I decided to euthanize her. She hadn't been eating, I felt so bad... I loved that fish.

 

[Crab Paste]

When I began fish keeping a few years ago, I had a tank with around 100 3-4 week old black and silver mollie fry in and a friend asked if she could have some, I said yes of course, when they're a little older. She got me into fish keeping in the first place so I was glad they were going to a good home She turned up a few days later and scooped out about half of them and took them off home. She didn't look after them, forgot to feed them for days at a time and they were all dead less than a month later.

I wasn't impressed

 

[wrs]

when I had a molly kill off my whole tank twice, before i knew it was the molly

 

[Torrean]

I'm not sure how they'd go about it but this should be pinned.